


The Hellhound of the Rockefellers

by Flourish



Category: Elementary (TV), Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Banter, Bonding, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Developing Friendships, Developing Relationship, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Stalking, Murder Mystery, Mystery, Original Character(s), Other, POV Alternating, POV Character of Color, POV Female Character, POV Male Character, POV Third Person, POV Third Person Limited, Relationship(s), Slow Build, Supernatural Elements, Team Bonding, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-15
Updated: 2013-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-04 17:55:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 30,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1083966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flourish/pseuds/Flourish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ichabod Crane and Abbie Mills are enjoying the fact that for a few weeks, the Headless Horseman has been dormant: their biggest problem is an escaped convict. Then Sherlock Holmes and Joan Watson are called in on what seems like an unrelated (and unimportant) issue. When the two cases intertwine, the four must work together to solve a murder and save an innocent life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kateandbarrel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kateandbarrel/gifts).



> This story is set, in _Elementary_ terms, after 2x05 (that is, Mycroft has not yet returned to town). In _Sleepy Hollow_ terms, it occurs between 1x05 “John Doe” and 1x06 “The Sin Eater” (that is, it takes place during the World Series hiatus). 
> 
> **Dear Noelle:** This is a Yuletide gift for you, but much more than that, it was a gift to me. It doesn’t precisely fulfill all of your requests, but it took up lodging in my skull and insisted on being written. I’m so glad it did, and I hope you will be too. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for inspiring this story, this crossover universe, and all the stories I’ll be writing in this universe in the future! (As you might possibly guess from this story, I fully intend to write a sequel...)  
> 

#### Pocantino Hills Estate, outside Sleepy Hollow, NY. October 5, 2013.

The old man was lying facedown on the graveled path. He was dressed for the chill of an autumn night, but he was shod in slippers alone: he had not intended to walk far. Dew beaded his hands where they splayed out like stranded starfish on either side of him. His face was veiled by the thin spill of his long white hair.

Ichabod Crane looked up past the crumpled body to where the ground fell away towards forest. Beyond that, miles and miles away, he could envision the incomprehensible spires of a fairy-city—the city on the isle of the Manhattoes that had grown ever larger during the centuries that Ichabod had slept below ground. What would it be like to live in such a metropolis, among eight million other souls, swarming like ants on their hill?

“Move over,” Lieutenant Abbie Mills told him, breaking his reverie. “Actually, just get back, will you? You’re getting footprints everywhere.”

He complied as she snapped away with her camera, shooting from every angle, taking close-ups of the disposition of the body and squatting down to photograph the clear paw-print in the mud beside the deceased’s head.

It was beautiful to see Abbie at work, in her element. Immediately after Ichabod had woken (that was how he thought of it now—'waking'—an easier concept than 'resurrection') he had been astonished by things that everyone in this modern world took for granted: hot and cold running water, chamber pots that whisked night soil away at the press of a lever, glass orbs that glowed with light yet remained cool to the touch. He had been pleased to see that the fledgling Colonial nation had grown and hardened into a true country, that the system of racial slavery had been abolished, that every child was taught to read the common tongue. Yet it was only after the first shock had faded that Ichabod could see the true strangeness in this time and place.

Ichabod understood hardly half of the tasks the Lieutenant busied herself with around the body. He knew that even if she explained each of them, he would still lack an understanding of the science that underlay her _technē_. A hundred lifetimes would not be enough to fully master the advances. 

It was fortunate that, for once, they seemed to be under no immediate threat from horsemen (headless or otherwise), witches, demons, or other malevolent beings. It could be no more than a brief reprieve, but any reprieve at all seemed heaven-sent. Perhaps, with a few days of calm, Ichabod might find a lending-library, or request the use of an updated _Encyclopédie_ from the local school-master, and set his eidetic memory to work.

Now Abbie was walking over to the witness to take her statement. She and the witness were friends, Ichabod knew: when they had arrived the Lieutenant had dropped her strict, businesslike mask to express her condolences. “I know you took care of Mr. Rockefeller for so long he was like your daddy,” Abbie had said. "Even though you two hadn't been up in Sleepy Hollow long, it was so easy to see you cared about him."

The witness, a Miss Kimberly Mortimer, was a doctor. She had been the dead Mr. Rockefeller’s personal physician, in fact, despite being no relation to him whatsoever. No womanish displays of shock from Dr. Mortimer: she had only pressed Abbie’s hands between hers with a speaking look and led them to where the body lay. Would Katrina have been a doctor, had she been born in a later age, or re-awoken as Ichabod had been? Would she have been a physician or a chiurgeon? Would she have pressed the Lieutenant’s hands just so?

To distract himself from such mournful thoughts, he ducked back beneath the curious yellow plastic tape and knelt beside the body. The deceased had been a handsome man, in life, though extremely old. He had been born a hundred and fifty years after Ichabod Crane had died, yet Ichabod was alive and he had gone on to Heaven or to Hell.

“Crane! We’re done!”

Ichabod brushed the gravel off the knees of his pants (why had he been buried in his second-best clothes? Only Katrina knew, he supposed, and he would not waste their precious time together asking her) and answered her summons. The good doctor was deep in conversation with a person whom Ichabod assumed was the coroner. “I take it that there was nothing untoward about Mr. Rockefeller’s earthly remains?”

The Lieutenant shook her head. “Old man, ninety-three years of age, dies of a heart attack? No Moloch, no Mr. Sandman, no mystery here.”

* * *

#### #42 Stamford Ave., Brooklyn, NY. October 17, 2013.

“PS1. Tonight,” Holmes said.

“PS1 tonight what?” Watson asked, stirring her tea and idly wiping crumbs off their always-disgusting kitchen countertop.

“PS1, tonight, the opening of a particularly interesting show of portraiture. Title, ‘There’s Nothing There.’”

Surprised, Joan took the time to examine Holmes more closely. He didn’t seem high (not that she really thought he would get high, at this point; she no longer worried when they walked into a crime scene and found drugs, or when he went out at night and didn’t come back for hours). He also didn’t seem manic, which suggested that there was no case at PS1. She’d thought he was avoiding art, since the incident with Moriarty. Perhaps it was a gesture of reconciliation. 

“Portraiture as in paintings, or portraiture as in someone standing on a table smearing themselves with mustard and ketchup while singing Britney Spears songs backwards through a vocoder?”

“Paintings. The minimalist impulse carried through. What might an artist say by choosing a particular color of paint, or brand of canvas?”

Now she saw the appeal. “So you can test your knowledge. Then we’ll ask the curator to see if you’re right.”

Sherlock half smiled. “So that you can test _your_ knowledge. The curator is a personal friend. He allowed me early access yesterday.” 

“All right, but I get to pick the restaurant for dinner.”

“I wouldn’t dream of anything else.”

“And I have a friend coming over in a few minutes. You remember?”

Sherlock ceased fiddling with the tea things. “Yes.”

“Good, because I think she’s going to bring us a case.”

He turned to her, hands on his hips. “A real case?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think you’ve slept with her, so it can’t be a repeat of _that_.” The words came out cattier than Joan had intended.

“When she comes to the door, I suppose we’ll see,” Holmes said. “I remember every woman I have copulated with, but I have never made a point of learning all of their names.”

She felt irritated (that she had risen to his bait), then guilty (if she was angry at him for Jen, then how much angrier would he be when he found out about That Night?), then irritated again (at least she had never stalked him!) by turns. Tea could only do so much to soothe her nerves. “Well, let’s hope,” she said, inadequately.

“That I have copulated with this friend of yours? Or that I haven’t?”

Fortunately, the doorbell rang, sending Watson up the stairs and rendering response unnecessary.

Dr. Kim Mortimer looked just as she had in medical school: hair dyed a shade darker than could possibly be natural, wide froggy good-natured face, a short neck almost disappearing into her narrow shoulders. When they hugged hello, she was tall enough to press her nose into the crown of Joan’s head. “It’s been so long—!”

They made awkward small talk for awhile, then made introductions—Holmes had followed Joan and stood, hovering, in a way that seemed calculated to prevent any real conversation. Kim seemed relieved when Holmes indelicately turned the conversation to detection, and thence to her problem.

“I realize that this sounds kind of out there. And I know that you’re probably busy, solving murders, and serious things like that—”

“But,” Holmes interjected.

“ _But_ Mr. Rockefeller was a very wealthy and influential man. And he would have appreciated your help. I know he would have.”

Joan clasped her hands together, an exaggerated gesture of understanding. “It’s okay, Kim. You know I’d help you in any way I can, Rockefeller or no Rockefeller.”

Kim smiled wanly. “It’s a big ask. And I can’t pay you. Maybe once everything is completely settled with the will...”

“We can worry about that later,” Joan said. She thought of Kim in medical school: coffee runs at two in the morning, flashcards they traded for anatomy class, seats saved in the back of lectures. “For now, just tell us what happened.”

“I’ve got it right here—” Kim fished in her Longchamp purse for a moment, then came up with a plastic bag. Inside were two pieces of paper, one white, one yellowed. “I received those a few days ago. They were on my doorstep just like that.”

Joan reached for the bag, but Holmes intercepted it, holding close to his face and then far away and then close again. “Seventeen eighties the one and two thousand tens the other,” he announced. “When each of the notes was written, Watson. Observe.”

The yellowed piece of paper was the bigger one. It was printed, not handwritten, and seemed to have been torn from a book.

> A Story from the Tappan Zee. 
> 
> A pedlar paſſing through the land known as the _Philipſe Manor_ , _Johann Rockenfeller_ by name, was found to be treſpaſſing upon the Demeſne of _Mr. William French_ , in Service as Master of Hounds to Frederick Philipſe. This Mr. French chas’d Mr. Rockenfeller from his home by means of an admirable pack of Dogs. 
> 
> Some years later, when Frederick Philipſe had shown himſelf a Traitor to the just Cauſe of the Coloniſts, the land of Philipſe Manor was divided and sold at Auction, and Mr. Rockenfeller purchas’d the Home of Mr. French and turn’d him out to _seek a new Employment_. The Wife of Mr. French was _unamus’d_ , and being a Witch-Woman set a Curſe upon Mr. Rockenfeller, by means of killing the famous Dogs, and _boyling_ them, and _burying_ their Remains beneath the Hearth-Stone of her House.
> 
> The Curſe was this: that the Sons of Mr. Rockenfeller, _unto the laſt generation_ , shall be chas’d by Hounds from the very Depths of Hell, from Sunſet til the Witching time, each E’en that they spend on the Philipſe Manor. And that they be _kill’d_ by them, if they ever are _caught_. The _efficacy_ of this Curſe has not been prov’d, for Mr. Rockenfeller has left the Land he bought _untenanted_. At Last Report he has gone to dwell in Virginia.

The other note was printed too—on a laser printer.

> The story is true.

“Someone is toying with your affections for Mr. Rockefeller, Dr. Mortimer,” Holmes announced, taking the baggie back, opening it, sniffing the contents exaggeratedly. “Ah. Musty. How soon after his death did you receive this missive?”

“The next day,” she said. 

“I take it that there weren’t any dogs involved in his demise?” Watson asked.

“No,” Kim said—but she toyed with the length of her hair as she did, and her voice was unsure. “At least, there was no _medical_ reason to say so. He wasn’t mauled. Jacob Rockefeller died of a heart attack. He was out on a walk. Nothing strange about that; I’d been treating him for hypertension. Except he usually didn’t walk at night; he liked to walk after lunch. And when we found him there were paw prints.”

“How large?” Holmes asked.

“Very. Like a Great Dane or an Irish Wolfhound.”

“And did he keep a dog?”

“No, and there couldn’t have been one anywhere nearby. This is what’s bothering me. See, when Mr. Rockefeller died, we had just left Virginia and moved to Pocantino Hills. Are you familiar...? Pocantino Hills is the old Rockefeller estate. The next closest town is Sleepy Hollow. Pocantino is about five miles square, and it has a stone wall all around it. There’s one gate, and it’s guarded. You couldn’t sneak a dog in if you wanted to. The only people who can get in are people who have business on the estate.”

“Can you think of any reason why someone might want to scare you? Or prank you?” Joan asked. It was hard to imagine Kim Mortimer making enemies, but stranger things had happened.

Kim shook her head. “I’ve been thinking about that. Who would want to send me something like this? So I thought about different motives. Money could be one. What if someone wanted people to come to Pocantino Hills? Sleepy Hollow does a lot of tourism business around Halloween, with the Headless Horseman and everything. If there was a ghost story at Pocantino, maybe people would want to come there, too.”

“But Pocantino isn’t open to the public...?” Joan confirmed.

“Right. And anyway, if they were trying to stir up interest, why would they just send me the note? Wouldn’t they want to publish it in a newspaper or something?”

“If they thought you would go to the police, maybe,” Joan offered, but the idea sounded thin even to her ears. She was beginning to wonder whether this _wasn’t_ another nothing case like Jen’s. Surely Kim wouldn’t have made something like this up, or blown it out of proportion, just for an excuse to catch up with an old friend? She never would have done something so silly when they were living together. She would have just forthrightly said ‘I’ll be in town, I’d like to see you.’ Of course people change, Joan reflected, but surely not that much.

Holmes turned around with a “hmm” and began fiddling with a clever new lock that lay out on the desk: a sure sign that he was done with this person and wished them to leave. “Thank you for your information, Dr. Mortimer. We’ll get back to you soon.”

“Are you in New York for long?” Joan asked Kim, gently moving her towards the door. She wasn’t going to let Holmes bait her again. “Sherlock’s always like that. Maybe we could get coffee, or drinks, somewhere a little more private?”

“I’m just in town for the next couple days.” A rebuff. “I was Mr. Rockefeller’s executor, so I had to arrange for the funeral down in Virginia. Win came back up with me—that’s Winthrop Rockefeller, he’s inheriting Pocantino Hills. I’m going to introduce him around the place. And then of course I’ll have to move.” She made a little rueful noise in the back of her throat.

“Do you know what you’re going to do now that Mr. Rockefeller’s passed?”

“Well, the move won’t be hard. I hadn’t even really unpacked from moving up here. So I guess I’ll travel a little, then find another patient. Maybe in New York. He made sure I had good recommendations.”

“That’s something, at least.”

“Even though he was old, and he’d lived a good life...” Kim glanced back into the other room. Holmes had disappeared up the stairs. “You know how it is to lose a patient, Joan. You always think there’s something you could have done, even when you know it isn’t true.”

Right. Kim had no idea. Joan took her cool hand, pressed it, remembering the feel of that simple gesture a hundred times in the past. “What was he like?”

“Mr. Rockefeller? Like a grandpa without any grandkids,” she said. “He was too old for email and too deaf for the phone, and towards the end he more or less lived for his butterfly collection. He was lonely, I think. Win liked him, but Win is only twenty-two, and you know what twenty-two year olds are like.”

“Not very interested in great-uncle Jacob?”

“Exactly. And not very interested in butterflies, either.” Kim shook herself a little. “Would it be all right if I brought him by here tomorrow? I mean, if someone really is going on about this curse, he’s probably the next person who’ll get a mash note.”

When Joan had shown her out and come back into the living room, Holmes had come back into view, dangling the baggie between two fingers. “What was that?” she asked. “I’m not your secretary. I don’t just bring people in and show them out when you want.”

“Dr. Mortimer is your friend, not mine, and you are therefore responsible for her ejection from the premises when we are finished with her,” Holmes enunciated crisply. “In any case, I hope you are not very close friends. Do you know whether she is partial to Yves St. Laurent?”

“She’s more of an L.L. Bean kind of person,” Watson said. In point of fact, Kim had been wearing a pair of black pants she recognized from the window of Ann Taylor. Surely Holmes could tell the difference between designer and off-the-rack fashion...?

 “I meant,” Holmes said, “her scent. A doctor would not be in the habit of wearing perfume on a daily basis—some patients are highly sensitive to smells—but she might have a favorite bottle for use at special occasions. Never mind. I fear that Dr. Mortimer must remain the central figure in our investigation, at least until we have the opportunity to meet the other inhabitants of Pocantino Hills.”

* * *

#### The old Corbin cabin, Sleepy Hollow, NY. October 18, 2013.

“Ichabod!” 

The noise of the passage screamed in Ichabod’s ears, almost drowning Katrina’s voice. The forest, grey as always, whipped with wind.

“We are safe for now, my love,” she said, coming towards him. She was dressed as she never was in life: a gown dyed so deeply black that it seemed to suck the light from her surroundings, her hair long and loose, her lips and cheeks garishly rouged. He missed her plain dress, her plain speech.

“I have missed you,” he told her. “Katrina—I have missed you.” It was true, though not as true as he might have wished.

“I watch you,” she said simply. “You have found a true partner in Abigail Mills.”

“I found my true partner in _you_ ,” Ichabod insisted.

She shook her head. “You do not know what I am. How many times have you wondered, Ichabod, why it was such a simple matter for me to leave the Society of Friends, to be thrown out of Meeting and cleave to you? How many times have you wondered whether I hid more than merely my witchcraft from you?”

Ichabod shook his head. “Never.”

“You are lying, Ichabod. I always could see a lie in your pretty eyes.” She reached one hand to his face, but her fingers stopped a half an inch away from his bearded cheek. “The inward light dims when you lie.”

Ichabod shook his head again, trying to dispel the maddening buzzing in his ears. “Are you alive or dead? I breathe, I walk—but you do neither.”

“Moloch holds me here against my will,” she said. “My body is dust. I could find another, if Moloch freed me—I might unchain my spirit from this form and tie it to another person’s flesh. But it would drive them out, Ichabod. It would sever their soul from their body.”

He recoiled. The distance between them seemed suddenly insurmountable, her rouged face demonic and leering. “Another person’s soul—! Katrina, you cannot do this thing.”

From far away, she reached out her arms helplessly. “Indeed I can not. Not while Moloch holds me here.” A light shone behind her, and her black-swathed body cast a long shadow across Ichabod’s face.

“Not even if we find a way to free you!”

She looked old, then, and very, very sad. “No, not even then, my love,” she said. “The only reason I would take such a course is for you, and you are already slipping away from me.”

Ichabod tried to say ‘no,’ tried to reach for her again—but she was right. He was slipping away from her, slipping on the leaves and detritus that littered the forest floor, falling, falling, falling and then waking.

The light was the sun, slanting through his open window. Someone was knocking at the door. He knew without looking that it was Lieutenant Mills. Who else would it be? The people of this time and place did not often come a-calling.

“Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey!” she caroled, as soon as she saw him stirring. Her face peeked between the blinds.

“ _Do_ you have eggs and bacon concealed somewhere upon your person?” Ichabod asked, letting her in.

“Nope, but you could make us some.”

He glanced disdainfully at the wholly inadequate hearth. “I realize that someone, somewhere, understands the use of that infernal box you refer to as the ‘stove.’ However, I am not that person.”

“Perfect time to start.” Without asking permission, Abbie hauled open the door of the refrigerator and began rummaging around. “Have you been eating anything but yogurts and coffee?”

Strictly speaking, Ichabod had attempted to prepare a ‘Hungry-Man Pub Favorites Beer-Battered Chicken,’ which had been stored frozen and which package had informed him he need ‘simply cook and serve,’ but the experiment had not been a success. “I find yogurts to be both convenient and delicious,” he hedged. “They are the apotheosis of clabber.”

“Right.”

The stove’s functions were simple enough, once explained, though even Abbie had to admit that how the numbers one through ten on the dials were meant to correspond to ‘hot enough to warm,’ ‘hot enough to fry,’ and ‘hot enough to boil,’ et cetera was not obvious. The oven too required no arcane knowledge, though Ichabod could not help but test the timer (“digital,” Abbie said, though she had no explanation for what relationship it bore to one’s fingers) against his pocket-watch to ensure that it was correct.

The scent of bacon and eggs was heavenly in the confines of the cabin. “Shall I pour the beer then?” Ichabod asked.

Abbie looked at him as though he had sprouted another head. “It’s nine o’clock in the morning!”

“And we are having our breakfast, and traditionally food is accompanied by drink, therefore...”

“I bought you O.J.!”

“I am blissfully ignorant of what ‘O.J.’ might be.”

“Orange juice.”

He recalled the paper carton with garishly bright oranges painted across its sides. Orange juice. They had discussed it in the market, the _super_ market, how today oranges were inexpensive enough to be eaten by anyone, how their juice was seen as a staple. He had assumed that she had meant that it was a common dessert, or a common additive to other foods. Apparently he had assumed incorrectly. “I still do not understand your aversion to beer.”

“I make a rule of not getting drunk before five unless the day is going really badly,” Abbie said. How would she behave, when she was intoxicated? Would it make her angry? Or bubbly, cheerful, happy? Would she touch him more or less?

“Drunkenness is for whisky, Lieutenant. I was speaking of a beverage for the purposes of our refreshment only.”

“Well, in this place and time, beer gets you drunk. We have water filters now. We don’t have to put booze in everything to make it safe to drink.”

“Is ‘O.J.,’ eggs, and bacon a common breakfast then?” he asked as he poured juice for them both, watching her face for a hint as to how much to serve. She gave no hints. He filled each glass to the brim.

Poking at the bacon, she snatched a piece from the hot pan with fingers alone. “Well, usually I just get coffee and donuts—you remember donut holes? But when you have a day off, for Sunday or something? Sure.” She looked pleased as punch to be eating bacon straight from the pan, but Ichabod did not doubt that if he tried to follow suit she would rap his knuckles smartly with her spatula.

“And is it a ‘day off,’ Lieutenant?”

She grinned at him. Her smile was contagious. He found himself smiling back like a loon, like someone who had not woken up hundreds of years away from his loved ones, from his family. He found himself smiling back as if he had not a care in the world. “Sure is. And I’ve got plans for you. We’re going to start teaching you to drive.”

* * *

#### #42 Stamford Ave., Brooklyn, NY. October 18, 2013.

Watson’s first impression of Winthrop Rockefeller Jr. was of overwhelming youth. He was a big, brawny kid, on the short side—but when he took off his safety-orange parka, she saw that there was a lot of muscle beneath the fat. His demeanor matched: a good ol’ boy, Watson thought.

“I don’t mind telling you that I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said, almost first thing. “Sorry, Mr. Holmes, Miss Watson.”

“Doctor Watson. And not believing in things is a very bad way to begin,” Holmes said. “I believe in everything until I can rule it out. Nevertheless. Tell us, please, why you are here, if you don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Well I’m not too proud to tell you that I made fun of Dr. Kim when she told me about the hellhounds,” Win said, “but this morning someone played a trick on me and I’d rather not have it happen again.” Digging in his jeans pocket, he brought out a slip of paper and slapped it down on the living room table. It was typed in a large font, easily readable from afar.

> As you value your life, _**STAY AWAY FROM KYKUIT.**_

“Kykuit is the name of the big house at Pocantino Hills,” Kim explained fretfully.

Holmes ignored the note, rocking back and forth on his heels. “Tell me, Winthrop,” he said, popping the ‘p’ between his lips, “what exactly have you inherited from your great-uncle Rockefeller?”

“Some land and a whole lot of money,” Win said. “Like, five miles of land. Square.”

“And what were the other provisions of the will?”

“Some money went to Dr. Mortimer, some to the groundskeeper—Nick something—and some to one of Uncle Jacob’s bug friends. You know, she’s an entomologist, she was the only one who’d talk to him about that stuff. And some to a few charities. Not a lot, though, he gave away a lot of money when he was alive.”

“Have you made a will yourself?”

Win looked at him like he was crazy. “I’m not exactly going to die tomorrow.”

“But you are now a very wealthy young man. One of the wealthiest young men in the country.”

“I was rich before,” Win said. “Anyway, who would I leave it to? I’d be dead. Who cares?”

“Money is an excellent motive for murder.” Holmes was enjoying himself, Watson could see. Did Win remind him of the boys who had teased him in school, rich and athletic and carefree? 

“Who’s talking about murder?” Win seemed genuinely surprised. “I thought we were talking about some not very funny practical jokes.”

“‘Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.’ But never mind. Dr. Mortimer, please tell me everyone who might possibly benefit from Mr. Rockefeller’s will, if young Winthrop were killed right now.”1

With a few interjections from Win, Dr. Mortimer described a family with few friends and fewer children, sketching a family tree on the back of a catalog.

It was surprising that Jacob Rockefeller had inherited the Rockefeller estate at all, because he was actually the third sibling in his family. His older sister, Abigail, was estranged from the family as a young woman: she’d married someone unsuitable (“His name was João Rabalo or Cabalo or something. João is Portuguese for John,” Win said, helpfully). In any case, none of her children were living. Jacob’s older brother, John Rockefeller III, died at the age of twelve, drowned on the Pocantino Hills property. Therefore, since Jacob never married, his heir was his younger brother Winthrop—and Winthrop’s son John Rockefeller IV, and then (when John died in a car crash a few years earlier) Win.

Under normal circumstances, there would be no one left to inherit from Win, should he die. But Jacob's will had been very specific with regard to Pocantino Hills. It could only be passed down to other descendants of Johann Rockenfeller. The next nearest descendant was a woman named Lisa McClintock. “And if you think she might be involved in the whole thing, I assure you she is not,” Dr. Mortimer said. “She lives in Maryland, and she’s an Episcopalian priest. She would do whatever Jacob—and then Win—wanted done with the estate. I’ve never met a more unassuming woman.”

Watson expected Holmes to jump on that, but he let it pass. Instead he turned to Win. “And what do you want to do with the estate?”

Win shrugged. “Depends what it’s like. I’ve never been there. I guess the house needs some work. I’ll probably fix it up over time. I’m going to law school in the fall, but I might live there when I’m done, if I get a job in New York.”

“Corporate law?”

“Civil liberties. Don’t need more money.”

“Hm.” Holmes cocked his head. “And what about the other people on the estate?”

“The other people?” 

“Surely your uncle had some wishes as to who would remain living there.”

Win looked uncomfortable. “Well, Dr. Kim and I talked about it, and she’ll be moving on...”

“My work here is done,” Dr. Mortimer said, with a smile that didn’t quite convince.

“...and I’ll still need the groundskeeper. Probably always. He can stay where he is or move into Dr. Kim’s rooms, I don’t care. The entomologist, Erica, she’s in the will. She’s supposed to get to rent her house for a dollar a month until she finishes her research. That’s fine too. I don’t need three houses.”

“Admirable restraint,” said Holmes.

“But look, whoever is doing this, maybe they don’t _know_ that I’m willing to let everything stay the same. Maybe the groundskeeper thinks I’m going to fire him. I just don’t want to wake up with a horse head in my bed or something.”

Watson rolled her eyes. “Okay. Sherlock may be dramatic, but I’m pretty sure we’re not dealing with the Mafia. You don’t need to worry about that.”

“I rule out no possibilities,” Holmes said gravely.

“Yeah, well, I do.”

“Anyway,” Win said, “I didn’t tell you the other thing that happened today. I went out to breakfast, and when I came back the hotel had that letter for me. It was in a plain white envelope. But someone had also been in my room and they’d taken one of my Sperries.”

“You brought Sperries to New York City in October?” Watson asked, amused.

Win shrugged. “I wore them on the plane, so I know I had both of them then. But the hotel can’t find it and neither can I. Who would steal one shoe?”

“Someone with a shoe fetish,” Holmes suggested.

That seemed to break the ice. Win stared at Holmes for a second, then burst out laughing. “A shoe fetish! The stinkier the better!”

“We can only hope,” Holmes said. “The alternatives are far more disturbing. Now. I am given to understand that you intend to travel to Pocantino Hills on the morrow? Very good. Watson and I shall join you.”

This time Holmes took the lead in ushering their clients out the door, holding it open in the most courtly—and pushy—possible manner. Once they were safely out, however, he ran back upstairs, pulling back the curtains to look through the top-floor window. Watson followed, curious. 

As they watched, Win’s sleek blond head and Kim’s tousled brown one bobbed down the steps and out to the street. Win stopped—he’d caught his parka on the fence around the brownstone, and from his frustrated gestures they could see he’d ripped it. They walked past an idling cab, flagged down a free one, and disappeared from sight within its cushioned interior.

“Quite interesting, Watson. What did you see?” Holmes asked, after their cab had disappeared uptown.

“They were being followed,” she answered. “There was a young man in that stopped cab. African-American or Indian, I’d say, from his skin color. Really stubbly cheeks. I couldn’t see a lot of his face, but his shirt had a very wide, notched collar.”

“Excellent! But remember: anyone can change their skin tone with makeup. Do you recall that cab’s number?”

“No,” Watson had to admit.

“Never mind. I do. What do you make of the relationship between Win and Kim?” Holmes savored the slant-rhyme of the names.

Watson considered. “He’s attracted to her,” she said. “But she’s not interested, and he thinks she’s too old for him anyway.”

“Why do you say that?”

Watson shrugged. “Body language. And having encountered a few young twerps in my life. And I know Kim.”

“An imprecise art and personal experience are not enough on which to base your conclusions. Still, I agree with your summation. Too bad they will never get over their preconceived notions about socially acceptable lust. There are enough young women panting after elderly men in the world; it would create some balance in the universe...”

That was not exactly what Joan had meant about Kim not being interested, but she let it go. It was healthy for Sherlock to misunderstand things, every once in awhile. It gave her hope that he could not always see through her.

* * *

#### Sleepy Hollow Police Department, Sleepy Hollow, NY. October 19, 2013.

“The escapee is Rebecca Lufton, aged forty-one.” The woman in the photo on the briefing room screen was broad-shouldered and tall, wispy blonde hair scraped back into a tight and greasy ponytail. “It is unknown what time she escaped, though it is estimated at between ten and eleven this morning. The method of escape appears to be guard error.” 

“Ah, excuse me, sir? What do you mean by _guard error_?” Officer Morales’ voice was full of humor.

“The prisoner obtained contraband civilian clothes,” Captain Irving said. “She walked out of the facility. Every joke that can be made has been made, Officer Morales. Feel free to remain silent.”2

Ichabod shifted in his seat. It seemed highly improper to speak out at such a gathering; he was hardly a member of the Sleepy Hollow Police Force, and no local militia enjoyed interlopers, he knew. Yet he had many questions. Lieutenant Mills had a notebook in her hands, with the tissue-thin lined paper which she preferred; commandeering it, he wrote:

Glancing at the page, Abbie wrinkled her brow and cast a curious glance at Ichabod. He paid rapt attention as Irving spoke of the ‘inner and outer perimeters’ and as she scribbled.

Ichabod frowned.

  


Ichabod blinked. 

Lieutenant Mills had already transferred her attentions back to the briefing. “Sir, do we have any particular reason to believe Lufton might have made it as far as Sleepy Hollow?”

“We do not. Our role is to provide a show of force at key intersections and public transportation hubs within our jurisdiction, while the main focus of the investigation remains closer to the prison itself...”

Her admonition was fair. _She_ had to carry out her duties, although _he_ was not responsible for anything outside a narrowly supernatural purview. He resolved himself to spend his time in some fruitful manner: considering the many linguistic shifts that had occurred since he had fallen asleep, or perhaps observing Captain Irving’s use of the piece of plastic Mills referred to as a ‘laser pointer’ in order to someday learn to operate one himself.

Lieutenant Mills found these things second nature. There were days when General Washington, when Katrina, when Ichabod’s troops seemed more real than any of the strange materials and smells and sounds of the day-to-day twenty-first century did. The shadows of the past lay heavy on his vision, then, and seemed to obscure the Starbuckses and bicyclists and asphalt of today’s Sleepy Hollow. On those days Mills was his lodestone. The fundamental difference between times past and future was erased when they were together. She could guide him through, and he knew she would do it—today, tomorrow, even after he had thoroughly found his feet.

Ichabod turned his head as though that would make the paper make more sense.3 Part of him wanted to brush the confusion off. Another part knew that those reactions only prolonged his agony. Finally he wrote,

Abbie smiled.

  


She giggled this time, and Ichabod sat back, pleased, waiting for Captain Irving to stop speaking, waiting for his Lieutenant to give him another modernity lesson.

* * *

#### On board a Metro-North train, NY. October 19, 2013.

The train from Grand Central Station to Tarrytown and on to Poughkeepsie runs every thirty minutes, sometimes more frequently. Boarding, one smells the ozone of a train station, the funk of hundreds of thousands of commuters going to and fro every day. The first few stops are urban as ever. Then it passes through industrial districts, then the suburbs. Running express, it races past stop after stop, the vast expanse of the Hudson out one window, the vaster expanse of the sky above. 

Joan looked out over the hills, blazing with color on this sunny October morning. She felt the exhilaration and the agoraphobia of the lifelong city dweller: all this space! All these plants! For a moment, gravity seemed to let go of its hold, and the metal of the train car was the only thing keeping her grounded.

“Is your partner always like he was today?” Kim asked, out of the blue.

“Like what?”

“Changeable.”

Joan winced. ‘Changeable’ was a nicer term for ‘unreliable,’ and she would have been offended if the characterization wasn’t so completely accurate. Holmes had actually gone all the way to the Standard Hotel with her to meet Win and Kim, had accompanied them all the way uptown to Grand Central Station—then declined to buy a ticket. “I have been informed of a highly time-sensitive case of blackmail,” he had announced to their clients. “I shall join you in a few days. In the meantime, I leave you in Watson’s highly capable hands.”

“You haven’t seen the half of it,” she said.

“He is a genius, though, right?”

Something in Kim’s voice made Joan look at her, for a moment, not as a client but as a very old friend. Kim was by no means a beautiful woman, but she had such a compelling mobility to her features that it had never even occurred to Joan that anyone could think her ugly. When she spoke to patients she had a perfect balance of authority and deference; she could draw out personal information in five minutes that Joan would never be able to get in five years. Today, though, that deeply expressive, trustworthy face was betraying her. Her uncertainty was written all over it.

“Yes, Sherlock is a genius,” Joan told her. “He’s infuriating. I would not recommend him to anybody. But he’s a genius.”

“You wouldn’t shack up with anyone who wasn’t smart.”

“We’re not ‘shacking up.’ Honestly. Sherlock is just a friend.”

“We were ‘just friends,’ too.”

Joan closed her eyes. Kim’s voice was light, but she could feel the undercurrent of meaning. “That’s different. I was young. I was still trying to please my mother.”

“She must love your new career.”

“Actually, she does. She thinks I seem ‘fulfilled.’ And Sherlock can turn on the charm when he wants to. He just doesn’t do it very often.”

Kim bit her lip. Suddenly Joan remembered the other late nights in medical school—the ones with wine, not coffee. Kim’s lips always turned purple when she drank red wine. Kim bit them when she was stifling her feelings, when she was holding it in. Kim had bit her lip all through their time living together, had bit her lip when Joan’s mother had come over to see the apartment, had bit her lip when Joan had told her that the affair was over.

They had parted friends, and exchanged emails, and added each other on social networks. Joan had convinced herself that there was no more feelings between them that transgressed the bounds of any normal friendship. But Kim had bit her lip through all their partings. 

Joan searched for another topic. Not Sherlock. Definitely not Mycroft. Not her family. Not Kim’s family. “You know we already have a lead.”

“Really?”

It had been a stupid thing to say, because there was nothing else she _could_ say on the subject except “Yes, but I can’t tell you about it. I can’t tell anyone about it. You might accidentally let something slip, you know?”

“Sure,” Kim said. “Sure.” She turned carefully away and became conspicuously engrossed in the view: the creepy old Domino sugar factory, windows boarded up. Yonkers. Win, quietly snoring in the window seat. He seemed to have the ability to sleep anywhere.

Actually, their lead was probably why Holmes had so quickly decided not to go to Pocantino Hills. He had chivvied Joan out of the house early so that they could go review the Standard’s security camera footage. (“How are you going to get access to that stuff? That’s a nice hotel. They probably feel strongly about their guests’ privacy.” “I have my ways, Watson.” His ‘ways’ turned out to be bribery: one of the Standard’s security team was a pigeon fancier, and a Blue Bar Pigmy Pouter was involved. Joan firmly refused to hold the cage.) An hour’s work of fast forwarding and rewinding had confirmed their suspicions: the same stubble-cheeked young man who had followed Win and Kim had left the ‘stay away from Kykuit’ note at their hotel. His face was obscured, but that unfashionably wide collar was unmistakable.

That alone would hardly have inspired Holmes to flights of fancy, but the phone call they received shortly thereafter was carefully calibrated to drive him up a tree. It was the cab driver that had idled outside, calling them back after their attempts to get in contact through the cab company. His Jersey accent sounded doubly broad over the speakerphone as he told them that he’d picked the spy up outside the Standard, had driven him to Brooklyn, then waited outside #42 Stamford Avenue for an hour. They’d followed another cab back to a restaurant in the East Village, and when the spy had gotten out, he’d tipped well.

“Young guy,” the cabbie said, “maybe he was eighteen, I don’t know. Real young. Real heavy beard, though. He told me his name when he got out. It was real funny. ‘Sherlock Holmes.’”

In light of that conversation, it was almost understandable that Holmes might have wanted to stay in New York and try to pursue the spy further. It would have been more understandable if Joan had had any idea where he planned to begin, but as far as she could see, the trail was cold. With no name and no clear picture, how could he find a particular person in all of Manhattan?

By the time the train finally trundled under the Tappan Zee bridge and into Tarrytown, Watson had made up her mind to ignore Holmes’ inconstancies and just focus on the case. Win woke up moments before they came to Tarrytown station, which seemed perfectly natural in him: he had been given every possible advantage in the world, so why not good timing too?

The station was like any other on the Hudson line, not particularly quaint but very old; however, as they dragged their bags down the platform, several very visibly armed policemen gave them searching glances. Another clutch of police were sipping coffee and shooting the shit under the train station’s awning. “Is that normal?” Joan asked Kim.

“No,” Kim said. “Hold on. I’ll find out what’s going on. —Abbie!”

The shortest policewoman under the awning turned at the name. “Hey, Kim,” she said. “Who’s this?”

“Winthrop Rockefeller, our new neighbor. And my old friend Joan Watson, here for a visit. Win, Joan—Lieutenant Abbie Mills of the Sleepy Hollow police department, literally the only person I know in town who doesn’t live at Pocantino Hills.”

Abbie raised her eyebrows. “This about the old man dying?”

Kim looked sheepish. “How’d you know?”

“Watson? As in Watson and Holmes? We hear things from the NYPD sometimes. All good, about you, but your partner’s a real piece of work, yeah?”

There was no possible answer to that but a helpless shrug. Joan shrugged helplessly.

“So what’s with the SWAT team?” Kim asked.

Abbie laughed. “SWAT team? These fools? Right. The reason we’ve moved our donut feast to the train station is there’s a prisoner escaped from Bedford Hills. We’re out here in the off chance she got this far. You guys still got all that security at Pocantino?”

“We’ve got the wall, and there’s a guard during the day. What were they in prison for?”

“Murder,” Abbie said. “Her name is Rebecca Lufton. Had a cocaine problem, killed her dealer, in for life. Blonde hair, five foot eight, big woman. Do me a favor and keep an eye out.”

Kim nodded. “So you’re on high alert? No time for anything else?”

“Well, if you had something else for me to _do..._ ”

“Can you come show Joan where Mr. Rockefeller died, tomorrow?”

“Is there anything to show? —Never mind. Sure. I could use the break from all-day Lufton-watch.”

“Isn’t Bedford Hills kind of far from here?” Joan asked, once they’d settled on meeting the next afternoon and let Abbie get back to her strenuous coffee-drinking and passenger-examining.

“About fifteen miles north,” Kim explained. “They probably think she stole a car. Speaking of which, here’s ours.” She had arranged for the groundskeeper to leave her sensible little economy car in the parking lot for them (”There’s a couple cars that go with the estate, too, and I thought Joan could use one of them while she was here—as long as you can drive stick?”) and she drove them up Route 9 and onto a narrow highway called Bedford Road. 

Outside the quaint streets of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, the road wound through forests and forests and forests, trees arching over the road to enclose it almost entirely. The sun was setting, early now that it was October, and as they moved away from the houses of the town the darkness seemed to close in on them like a thick black blanket. The road’s white and yellow lines streamed ahead of them. Win pressed his forehead to the window and watched the darkened scenery go by with fascinated intensity.

The entrance to the Rockefeller family estate was nestled a quarter-mile back from the road, and they had to park the car and unchain the gate themselves at this hour. Then there was another three miles to drive along unpaved carriage roads, the woods still pressing in on them on either side. The wind whistled eerily. Joan was glad when Kim turned on the radio and Miley Cyrus started warbling about how “you came in like a _wreck_ -ing ball!” That, and the hum of the engine propelling them forward, helped remind her that they hadn’t gone back in time, that they were not driving further and further away from civilization but in fact towards Dr. Mortimer’s house and towards the house in which Win might very well live for the rest of his life.

Then, suddenly, the house was there. 

When Joan had heard of it, had understood that it was an old family seat built in the 1890s, she had imagined something built in the proper style of the Gilded Age. Kykuit was not like that at all. It huge, yes, but it seemed the model from which millions of subdivisions all over America with names like 'Colonial Pines' and 'Washington’s Hills' had been built. It looked formal, stiff, and closed.

“ _Hocus Pocus_ ,” Win said. He was right. You could almost see Bette Midler flying in on a vacuum cleaner and landing on the roof. Halloween was coming soon.

“You must be Winthrop!” A tall man had stepped from the shadow of the portico into the light still cast by Kim’s car’s headlamps. He took Win’s and Joan’s bags from them. “Welcome to Kykuit,” he said. He was broadly built, olive-skinned, no older than Joan. His dark hair and five o’clock shadow made him look roguish, an impression reinforced by a single earring in the shape of a silver star. “We’ve emailed. I’m the groundskeeper, Nick. Barrymore.”

“Right! Yeah, I’m Winthrop.”

“And this is Joan,” Kim added.

“Pleased to meet you.”

 Nick carried the bags inside and plunked them down just inside the door. “I didn’t know what you’d want to eat or when, but I stocked the fridge,” he said. “I’m in the last bedroom on the left, upstairs. Kim’s in the one two doors down. There’s only the one bathroom upstairs, in the middle. Internet info’s on the fridge.”

“You can really imagine someone living here in the seventeen-hundreds, can’t you?” Win said, looking around. “It’s so...”

Creepy, Joan wanted to say, but she didn’t think that was appropriate. The front door led them into an entrance hall that was little more than a corridor; stairs dominated her first impression. The ceiling was low and the darkly aged hardwood floors didn’t make the room feel any less stifling. Portraits hung on either wall, the oldest nearest to the front door, marching down through the years in an unbroken line. “It feels so historical,” Joan said. “Very rich. Very family.”

“Your great-grandmother hung these paintings,” Kim told Win. “Here’s your great-grandfather.” His portrait was almost at the end of the hall, painted in a soft-focus style that didn’t match his surroundings at all. Still, he was a striking man: strong jaw, square forehead, deep-set eyes that seemed older than the rest of her face, a halo of blond hair softening the effect of such harsh features. 

“You look like him,” Joan said, which was true, particularly in terms of coloring.

“Yep. Anyone hungry?” Win asked, jovially. “Doc?”

“Not me,” Kim said. “I’m for bed.”

“Not even some tea?” Joan asked.

“No,” Kim said firmly. “Remember, tomorrow we’re going to go over the scene of Jacob’s death at one o’clock. Good night.”

Joan watched her climb up the stairs, her hips swinging. She knew she had an audience. Kim had always been like that.

“Well, looks like it’s just you and me,” Win said. “Let’s get to it!”

The kitchen was only a little more modern than the rest of the house. It had been built to accommodate parties—three ovens, a six-burner stove—but it had been most recently remodeled in the 1950s, and though Barrymore obviously took good care of it, nothing could change its pastel enamel. In the cupboards there was the kind of food Joan associated with bachelorhood: canned food, saltines, trail mix. The fridge held beers, eggs, single-slice American cheese and a forlorn-looking package of Fresh-n’-Easy salad. She let Win make them grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soups, watched as he knocked over the saltshaker and threw a pinch over his shoulder.

“Superstitious?”

Win laughed. “Not really. Better safe than sorry. This house is fuckin’—pardon— _freakin’_ creeptacular.”

“I’m not your Mom.”

“You’re still a lady,” Win said, sheepishly. “Anyway, it’s a good thing Kim went upstairs, yeah? This is her home. It’s just a really old, weird, in the middle of nowhere home.”

Joan shrugged, taking a delicate bite of her sandwich. “She hasn’t lived here very long. She probably thinks it’s weird too.”

“Uncle Jacob didn’t. He loved this place.”

Joan raised an eyebrow. “I thought he didn’t spend a lot of time here?”

Win shrugged. “Didn’t have to. He made up for it by talking about it. Old family seat and everything. Well, I’m stuck with it now.”

When they finished eating, he disappeared upstairs, claiming a room and claiming that he was tired. She thought she could hear the sounds of _Call of Duty_ coming from under his door. Well, whatever.

Kim’s door was also resolutely shut. Joan stood outside it for a long time, wondering whether she should knock. Kim had practically waved the red flag in front of the bull, walking upstairs with that swing in her hips. But then, who was it directed at? And was it even intentional? And if she did knock, then what did she expect to happen—a friendly chat? A night of passionate fucking?

No. If Kim wanted to talk, Kim would have to make the first move herself. Joan picked out her own bedroom, closest to the center of the house, and withdrew for the night.

Cell phone reception was patchy in Pocantino Hills, so she resorted to Skype to try and get in touch with Holmes. She’d watched three illegally-downloaded episodes of _NCIS_ before he answered.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“Excellent.”

“Turn the video on, Holmes. I want to see your face when I’m talking to you.”

“I am afraid that will be quite impossible. I am currently using my smartphone, not a computer, which universally results in nausea-inducing shakycam. Additionally, I am nude.”

“TMI!”

“You would not accept any less of an excuse.”

“Okay, why don’t you call me back when you aren’t naked?”

“Very well, Watson, but tell me this: Have you learned anything?”

“I’ve learned that I don’t like Skyping with you.”

“An excellent start.”

Later that night, lying in an uncomfortable bed, it occurred to Joan that she did not have to stay at Pocantino Hills. She could go back to New York. She could move out of the brownstone and never see Holmes again. Or she could just go to a hotel, like a normal person.

She heard a soft noise from somewhere outside the house, like somebody crying. It stopped, started again, stopped for good. The wind.

It occurred to her that Nick Barrymore had dark olive skin and a very stubbly face.

Then she fell asleep.

* * *

#### Pocantino Hills Estate, outside Sleepy Hollow, NY. October 20, 2013.

Joan woke up to discover that the sun was out. Their distance from civilization suddenly seemed like a blessing: she could hear birds singing, could smell the freshness of the air. Even the low ceilings didn’t seem so gloomy. The house, she decided, was like the subject of a Vermeer. The light was what made it beautiful.

Win was awake before her. He suggested that they go out for a walk: Nick had left before sunrise to meet the grounds crews that were preparing the estate for winter, and Kim was still holed up in her room. Good. No room for awkwardness if they didn’t have to see each other. 

The beautiful day made Joan more enthusiastic about nature than normal, and they rambled down the long sloping hill and across a field to the woods. Win suggested that they go cross-country, but Joan insisted on sticking to the roads. Pocantino Hills was far wilder than she had believed possible, and even though she had packed her most sensible clothes, she wasn’t prepared to bushwhack.

Even staying on beaten paths, they quickly found themselves turned around. The woods weren’t dense, but there were many confusing little trails, none of them well-maintained. The leaves were just coming down, making the ground treacherous but not yet affording good sight-lines through the bare branches. Win seemed to know what he was doing, but Joan couldn’t help but feel a bit anxious as they got farther and farther from the house. It was beautiful, the orange leaves and the darker patches of green bushes, the soft breeze, the faraway sound of a brook, but it was foreign to her. She could imagine being a settler, coming from England or Holland, and finding these ancient woods—vast, initially welcoming, but deceptively dangerous.

How long would it take an ambulance to get out here? She wondered. Of course, that was assuming that your cell phone worked well enough to call 911.

The illusion that they were the only people in the world was so strong that Joan almost jumped when she saw a figure crouching in the bushes a few feet off the path. Win saw her too, and called out. “Erica?”

The figure straightened up, and Joan could see her properly: a tall brown-skinned woman with a shaved head, a strong jaw, deep dark eyes. She was dressed for a hike, and in one hand she held a specimen bottle with a huge beetle squirming inside. “Who’s that?”

“Sorry—you don’t know me. But Uncle Jacob talked a lot about you. I’m Winthrop Rockefeller.”

Uneasiness flashed across the woman’s face for a split second before her features resolved into a smile. “Erica Carvalho.”

“Joan Watson.”

“Erica was Uncle Jacob’s protégée,” Win said. “She’s the naturalist.”

“Beetles-R-Us,” Erica said. “Your one stop shop for creepy crawlies. Kim told me you were coming, but I didn’t think I’d see you out here.”

“Exercise,” Win said, patting his belly.

“Getting the feel of the place,” Joan said.

“Sleuthing? Finding clues? Who could the mysterious creepy-mailer be?” Erica laughed. “If I were you, I’d worry more about the actual curse on the Rockefellers than about that.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Jacob knew all about it, he just didn’t believe in it, and look what happened to him, right?”

Watson cocked her head. “I thought it was a forgotten legend.”

“Not here. You can ask Nick about it if you want, or the historical society over in Sleepy Hollow. Everyone knows that that’s why the Rockefeller men never stay in Kykuit for long.” Erica turned back to her beetle, examining it carefully through the glass of the specimen jar. “So who’s your suspect?”

“I can’t talk about an ongoing investigation,” Watson said. “What’s the bug?”

“ _Nicrophorus americanus_ ,” Erica said, “the American Burying Beetle. This one’s out pretty late in the season. He ought to be hibernating by now. They’re carrion eaters. But you can’t be fooled. There’s only a few kinds of beetle that care for their young, and _Nicrophorus americanus_ is one of them. Real family guys. Plus they’re endangered, so stay on the path, will you? You don’t want to step on any.” Erica opened the specimen bottle and let the beetle climb out onto her hand, then picked her way across the forest floor over to where Joan and Win stood, showing them her prize. It was almost two inches long, with a shiny black body and distinctive orange markings. 

“Beautiful.” Joan was being honest. It _was_ beautiful—beautiful and alien, like Sherlock’s bees.

“Now it’s time for him to go back where he came from,” Erica announced, and knelt to let the beetle trundle off her hand and down to a waiting log covered in twining vines. “Go hibernate! Don’t freeze to death, silly!”

“You always talk to them?” Win asked.

Erica flushed. “Well, not to every species. Mostly just to _Nicrophorus americanus_. They’re so big and smart...”

“Regular Einsteins?”

“For a beetle!” She stood and brushed the mulch off her knees. “Now, where are you headed?”

“Nowhere, really,” Win said. “Anywhere.”

“We ought to be getting back, actually,” Joan countered.

“Well, you can come with me,” Erica said. “I’ll show you a loop that will take you back to Kykuit. It’s on my way back home.”

She kept up a running patter with Win as Joan let them walk ahead, advocating for the expansion of the Rockefeller State Park Preserve, warning him against falling into hidden wetlands if he ever went off-trail. Win was rapt. Preserve us from young men who fall in love with every woman they meet!

“If you take this path, it’s a smooth little loop for a morning run,” Erica said. “You get up to the top of the hill and the sun rises over the forest...”

“Tomorrow morning I’ll go for sure,” Win quickly agreed.

The leaves crunched satisfyingly under Joan’s feet as they climbed a rise and jumped over a fast-running stream. There were fewer orange-leaved oaks and more yellow-leaved birches, and the forest was less thick. Erica was telling a sob story about why she had left Columbia for Pocantino Hills. Win nodded sympathetically. Joan let herself tune them out.

It seemed like barely any time at all before the path opened up and they were back on the main carriage road that they’d driven up the previous night. A car was parked in a little turnout. “This is me,” Erica told them. “My house is about a quarter mile up that way. Not a fun hike when you’re carrying groceries, let me tell you. Drop in anytime—just not after dark. I don’t want the hellhounds to get you!”

Her tone was jocular, but her smile didn’t reach her eyes. Joan watched her carefully as her dull green anorak disappeared up the trail among the trees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” I.ii.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> 2\. Yes, this method of escape [really happened and really worked](http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/An-interview-with-escapee-Charles-Victor-Thompson-1517862.php). The escapee: Charles Victor Thompson. He was on death row in Texas.
> 
>  
> 
> 3\. Ichabod would be familiar with the term ‘bore’ (as in a boring person) but not ‘bored’ ([which form is first attested in 1823](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001581.html)).


	2. Chapter 2

  
dogs

from: **shhhhhhh** <a.bee.ceeper@aol.com>  
to: Joan Watson <j.watson@gmail.com>  
date: Mon, Oct 21 2013 at 2:03 AM  
subject: dogs  


woof woof

￼

 

from: **Joan Watson** <j.watson@gmail.com>  
to: shhhhhhh <a.bee.ceeper@aol.com>  
date: Mon, Oct 21 2013 at 3:37 AM  
subject: Re: dogs

Holmes,

I am going to assume that, in human language, “woof woof” translates to “I cannot speak to you on Skype because my mouth is sewn shut. I would like it if you would elucidate your findings in our case for me via email.” I will do so. Note that I am not offering to unsew your mouth. You got yourself into it, you can get yourself out of it.

Why am I awake this late? Not because I was waiting for you to get in contact. I couldn’t sleep and I heard footsteps outside my room. I got up and looked into the hall and saw the groundskeeper wandering around with a flashlight. He went into one of the unused bedrooms on the northeast corner of the house, but just for a few minutes. He came out again and I had to escape back to my room so he wouldn’t catch me. He has a very heavy beard that gets very stubbly towards the end of the day. His name is Nick Barrymore. I think he might have been the person in the cab, but I can’t be sure.

This place is creeping me out. I thought I heard someone crying just before I went to sleep last night too. It’s easy to see how you could get very superstitious here. Maybe even superstitious enough to believe in hellhounds.

The other person I met is Erica Carvalho. She seems to have strong feelings about Pocantino Hills. She’s a naturalist working on an endangered species of beetle that lives on the grounds. But that would make her more interested in keeping the place quiet—not stirring up tourism. Still, I don’t think she’s actually as friendly as she’s acting.

This afternoon we looked over the scene of Mr. Rockefeller’s death. I was not expecting to find very much, since it’s been more than two weeks. There is a small garden at the back of the house, and he had walked out to the very edge of it, where it meets the forest. He had been standing there awhile, smoking a cigar. Kim said that he was trying to hide the habit from her, so maybe that explains why he was out at night. In any case, he had turned around to go back to the house when he died--his body was found face down with the head towards Kykuit. The policewoman who processed the scene was nice enough to bring me a thumb drive with photos. I’ve attached them. You can see the pawprints in them. They are definitely big, but they’re not very deep at all. A dog that heavy should have left deeper prints. They could be fakes.

The policewoman’s name is Lieutenant Abbie Mills. She seems competent enough, although she obviously was only bothering with the Rockefeller case to get away from the hunt for the escaped prisoner. (No doubt you saw that on the news.) She brought a “consultant” with her who is one of the strangest people I have ever met. He was dressed like a historical re-enactor and his name is Ichabod Crane. Apparently he is an Oxford professor on leave (or something. At first I thought he was celebrating Halloween early). When Kim mentioned hellhounds, he seemed to know all about them: the barghest, Black Shuck, the Church Grim, the gytrash, the gwyllgi, and most of all the Cŵn Annwn, which apparently is the Welsh name for the “wild hunt.” I assume you know about all of these things and probably more than I do so I will let you do the research. After all, you have access to all kinds of books whereas I only have Wikipedia and Google Scholar. Enjoy.

Anyhow, while the police were here Nick Barrymore was conspicuously absent. He turned up again the instant they left. Coincidence? Maybe.

Now I am going to sleep. I am supposed to go running with Win in less than three hours.

Joan

PS: Why are you using an AOL email address?

* * *

#### The old Corbin cabin, Sleepy Hollow, NY. October 20, 2013.

“Do I behave in a fashion that—shames you?” Ichabod asked, as he struggled to open one of the delicious-smelling packages Lieutenant Mills had obtained for them. It had come from an establishment referred to as ‘Spice n Rice Asian Fusion,’ and it had taken him far longer than he cared to admit to realize that this was a public restaurant or tavern of some kind.

Abbie raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean? —here, let me do that.” She elbowed him out of the way. Under her deft hands, the plastic package separated into lid and trencher, revealing a curious potage of potatoes, thinly sliced chicken, and peanuts in some sort of orange-tinted sauce. The next package held a mixture of beef and florets of what Linnaeus would have referred to as _Brassica oleracea_ , known as ‘broccoli’ to the Italians, a delicacy Ichabod had not eaten since his European tour.

“I mean that I noticed Doctor Watson observing me closely,” he explained. “I fear that I might have committed some social sin, beyond merely slipping into an overly didactic tone with regard to the hellhounds.”

Abbie shook her head. “Well, she’s never met you before. You aren’t exactly run-of-the-mill. Ah, ordinary.”1

“I have noticed _that_. I was hoping for more constructive criticism. If this is to be a long-term arrangement, which the Book of Revelations strongly suggests it shall be, I cannot always obtrude.”

Abbie handed Ichabod a bowl which she had prepared with fine white rice covered in the beef and broccoli and its brown sauce. The other dish, it seemed, was for her. She ate standing, digging into her meal with obvious pleasure. She watched, obviously hoping to observe his reaction to the food.

It was delicious, unctuously fatty, salty and spicy. The broccoli was at the peak of its freshness, cooked neither too little nor too much. He had to resist bolting it down like an animal.

Abbie chuckled. “The magic of MSG.” 

Ichabod could not be irritated at her pleasure in bringing him pleasure, but he did not particularly enjoy having his vast ignorance of the world pointed out, and he had no inkling of what ‘MSG’ might be. “You have not answered my question,” he pointed out around a mouthful of rice.

“About how you’re different?” She wandered over to the sideboard, taking her bowl with her, and looked down at a framed picture of herself and Sheriff Corbin. “I think it would be easy to say it’s the clothes, but that’s not it. You don’t walk the way everyone else does.”

“I ought to alter my gait?”

“Back up now! I didn’t say that. Even if we went shopping tomorrow and got you in the Gap from head to toe you’d still hold your fork weird, but who cares? Lots of people hold their forks weird.”

Ichabod looked at his fork. He did not see how his method of holding it was strange, but he put it down anyway. “My point is merely that if we are, together, the Witnesses, there are many things I must learn. My mistake some days ago with your gun was merely the beginning.”

“Cut yourself some slack,” Abbie said. Her meaning was obvious, though her idiom strange. “You know as much as I do about most of what we’ve got to deal with. That’s why we’re a good team, right? You tell me about the book of Revelations, I tell you about how to use a modern firearm.” 

She was right, of course, but Ichabod felt no less at sea for it.

“Anyway,” she went on, “no demons lately, and tomorrow I’m stuck at the train station again, so now’s a perfect time for you to practice getting around. You’ll feel better once you’re more independent. You could walk somewhere, or even call a taxi to go visit Jenny...”

A solo excursion—? Simultaneous excitement and anxiety awoke in Ichabod’s breast. Was he ready to venture out into the wide world alone? He trusted Lieutenant Mills’ judgment, knew that she would never allow him to take a course for which he was not prepared. He was not tied to her by the apron-strings; he spent nights alone in the cabin; but neither had he ventured past his front door without guidance.

Miss Jenny Mills’ asylum was quite far away, he knew: it would be impossible for him to walk so far, though he still found it difficult to fully comprehend the fantastic speeds of cars on the ‘free way.’ He supposed that ‘calling a taxi’ meant procuring conveyance—hiring a carriage. That seemed to promise social intercourse with at least one new person, the car-driver, and he was not at all certain that he was prepared for that, not after Dr. Watson’s stares. Yet there were other destinations, closer, to which he could convey himself upon his own two feet. And he was not at all certain that the Lieutenant’s assessment of 'no demons lately' was correct.

“That sounds like an excellent idea,” he said. “I already know where I shall go.”

* * *

from: **Joan Watson** <j.watson@gmail.com>  
to: shhhhhhh <a.bee.ceeper@aol.com>  
date: Mon, Oct 21 2013 at 6:41 AM  
subject: Re: dogs

Holmes,

Please let me know that you received my last email.

This morning I slept through my alarm so missed running with Win. I woke up about forty five minutes late to Win shouting. He had gone for the run by himself and got chased by a big black dog all the way back to the house.

Once the sun was up I went out to look at the route he ran. I brought Mace with me but I don’t think that I am likely to get attacked by any dogs. The curse doesn’t say anything about innocent visitors getting mauled. I didn’t see anything myself at first, but the path took me all the way past the gate to the property, where I encountered Mr. Ichabod Crane. He was trying to sweet talk his way in past the guard. 

We walked Win’s route together. Crane is apparently a professor of military history focused on the American Revolution, which explains why he is spending his sabbatical in Sleepy Hollow. It does not explain why he wanted to ask me about what it is like to be a “Chinee” in America. I didn’t notice any of your fellow Brits using that particular term when I was there. Is this a cultural thing or an asshole thing? The funny part is I am pretty sure he was serious and not trying to be offensive. It’s hard to believe that anyone in the twentieth century in a first world country could have not ever talked to a Chinese person before, but that was the sense I got. Especially since he figured out that he had said something wrong and apologized.

In addition to being the world’s most clueless white guy, it turns out that Professor Crane is a woodsman. (That’s what people call it in historical fiction, so that’s what I’m calling it now.) He grew up on a farm somewhere back in the UK, fox hunting and so on. He actually managed to track the dog through the woods—the dog _and a person with it._ This confirmed that it was a physical dog and not a ghost, just in case you were wondering. It’s black and it eats dog food, not babies, according to the scat he found. 

You have initiated me into a glamorous, glamorous profession. 

The person did not leave any scat. They were wearing men’s boots, maybe a size 8 or 9, but the prints weren’t clear enough to tell brand or style.

The trail went cold near one of the wetlands that Erica Carvalho told us to avoid. The wetlands look like just some more forest floor but you step and it’s marshy, and you step again and you’re up to your knees in water. Ask me how I know. Anyhow, the dog must have swum across it. The shoe prints stopped too. We didn’t try to follow. There must be a crossing, but we couldn’t tell where. We will come back with waders.

We did find one other very suggestive clue. There is a back gate into Pocantino Hills (!) and the lock is broken (!!) It’s on the side that leads out onto the state park. It isn’t big enough for a car to go through but it would be easy to sneak anything you could carry in that way. You could bring in the biggest dog in the world, no problem.

So that’s my day so far. I am going to take a nap now. This evening Win and I have agreed that we will stay awake and see if Nick Barrymore walks around again. If he does we’ll find out what he’s up to. 

Joan

PS: I still wonder why AOL.

￼

Barrymore, Mortimer, Rockefeller

from: **Joan Watson** <j.watson@gmail.com>  
to: shhhhhhh <a.bee.ceeper@aol.com>  
date: Tue, Oct 21 2013 at 9:56 AM  
subject: Barrymore, Mortimer, Rockefeller

Holmes,

You know what I’m going to say about email, but did you lose your phone? Or are you just being a jerk?

Nick Barrymore didn’t go walking around last night as far as Win and I could tell. We each sat in our rooms with the lights off IMing each other to stay awake. He’s a better writer than he is a talker. He’s a real libertarian type, Rand Paul and so forth, but part of that philosophy for him is a strange sort of noblesse oblige. I think he’ll do good things for Pocantino Hills. I even think he’ll protect Erica Carvalho’s corpse-eating bugs. (Not that he would legally have a choice... but the point is he won’t try to fight it.)

Win has been going through his great-uncle’s papers. There’s a lot of them here, considering that Rockefeller was only living at Kykuit for a couple weeks before he died. He did everything on hard copy, nothing on computers at all. So that’s been keeping him pretty busy. Not too busy to stay up again tomorrow, though. I think it’s good for him to feel like he’s doing something. It’s good for _me_ to feel like I’m doing something. I don’t have any leads, but at least I can investigate this.

I had dinner with Kim tonight. She didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. I don’t think she’s a suspect. I know you think she is, I know we aren’t supposed to rule anybody out, but she loved Mr. Rockefeller. She lived with him day in and day out, in Virginia and then at Pocantino Hills, for five years! What’s more, she told me that Erica Carvalho loved him too. They wrote letters back and forth to each other constantly. She thinks he channeled all of his paternal instincts into whatever young people he could find to spend time with him, and that he saw her, Erica, and Win all as sort of grandchildren.

Of course, most people don’t leave one of their grandchildren everything, let one grandchild rent their house for almost nothing, and kick the third grandchild out into the street when they die. I know. Money is the main reason people kill other people. You don’t have to tell me.

Joan

* * *

#### The old Corbin cabin, Sleepy Hollow, NY. October 22, 2013.

A sense of falling, roaring wind, a deeper and less recognizable sound, and then Ichabod was there, not in the forest this time but indoors. A house? The clapboard walls looked familiar after so many days of stucco and drywall, but it was not a place he had ever been before.

“You’ve come, my love,” Katrina said.

“I have no choice, when you summon me.”

“You used to love coming home.”

“This is not home,” Ichabod said, looking at the bare floorboards. Home was a tent with the Revolutionary army, or his father’s house in England, or Katrina’s living arms.

“It is the home we might have had.” She gracefully moved to a window, opened it and stood looking out on the blackness. Her corseted form looked frail and helpless, especially as compared to Lieutenant Mills’ easy physicality.

“What do you see?”

Katrina let her head hang down between her thin arms, braced on the sills. “There is nothing to see.” She turned. “There is nothing here, do you understand? This place is constructed from my mind.”

“Why?”

“To let us play house,” she said, her voice rueful. “And to draw you here, so I might warn you.” She pointed out the window. “They are waking, Ichabod.”

“What are waking?” He moved towards her a step. If he got too close or strayed too far, he knew, she would dissolve into the dream-stuff that this world was made of.

“I see you every day, Ichabod,” she said. “I see you laughing. I see you cooking eggs. I see you walking in the sun.” Her voice was bitter.

“I live because of you. You saved me for this purpose—”

Katrina’s voice was urgent. “Here I can protect you. In the world of the living I cannot. Your Lieutenant Mills cannot protect you either, do you hear? As capable as she is, she cannot destroy the specters of the past. She is more helpless than I. _Do you understand?_ ”

He did understand, more than she wanted him to. He read jealousy in Katrina’s face, her pretty eyes tight around the corners, her hands clenched at her sides. In the empty house that she had conjured to shield them against whatever was 'waking.'

Ichabod turned away, deliberately, slowly. He walked. He felt the dream-world falling away from him, felt Katrina reaching helplessly for him, heard her cry “wait—!”, and he opened his eyes to the morning sun. He lay in bed for a while, looking at the patterns in the ceiling’s plaster. If he could just focus on the plaster hard enough, he wouldn’t have to see Lieutenant Abigail Mills in his mind’s eye. He wouldn’t have to think of his wife, in Purgatory, growing further and further distanced from him. He wouldn’t have to face her desperate pleas. He wouldn’t have to accept the realization, heavy in the pit of his stomach, that she was right to be jealous.

* * *

TALK TO ME

from: **Joan Watson** <j.watson@gmail.com>  
to: shhhhhhh <a.bee.ceeper@aol.com>  
date: Thu, Oct 23 2013 at 12:12 AM  
subject: TALK TO ME

Holmes,

Please answer my emails, texts, and calls. I am not afraid to report you as a missing person if you do not let me know you are alive. Remember that my phone does not work here. You have to call Kykuit’s land line if you want to get in touch that way.

We found out what Nick Barrymore was doing. I don’t want to write it in an email. I need you to get in contact with me.

Joan

PS: I looked over the autopsy report for Mr. Rockefeller. As Kim said, he died of a heart attack. No dog bites visible, no unusual chemicals, et cetera.

PPS: ANSWER ME.

￼

 

from: **shhhhhhh** <a.bee.ceeper@aol.com>  
to: Joan Watson <j.watson@gmail.com>  
date: Thu, Oct 23 2013 at 12:15 AM  
subject: Re: TALK TO ME

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy>  
<http://thelastbastille.wordpress.com/2013/01/18/how-to-configure-use-pgp-encryption-for-email-mac-osx-instructions/>

My public key is attached.

How is Kim?

I am using AOL for the sake of nostalgia.

￼

 

from: **Joan Watson** <j.watson@gmail.com>  
to: shhhhhhh <a.bee.ceeper@aol.com>  
date: Thu, Oct 23 2013 at 12:33 AM  
subject: Re: TALK TO ME

Okay. Here is mine. Is it working?

I thought the NSA cracked this kind of security.

Why are you asking about Kim?

What nostalgia can you possibly have for AOL?

Joan

￼

 

from: **shhhhhhh** <a.bee.ceeper@aol.com>  
to: Joan Watson <j.watson@gmail.com>  
date: Thu, Oct 23 2013 at 12:35 AM  
subject: Re: TALK TO ME

Yes. Congratulations. We are now quite secret.

The NSA did not crack this kind of security. They would like you to think so. However, the United States government continues to use PGP as its standard encryption format. That is a strong vote of confidence.

As for Kim, I have a natural interest in all of your old flames. If you begin bringing a sexual partner home, we will have to design a 'sock system,' unless you have a heretofore undisclosed interest in exhibitionism.

At one time, I was a regular denizen of America Online chatrooms.

￼

 

from: **Joan Watson** <j.watson@gmail.com>  
to: shhhhhhh <a.bee.ceeper@aol.com>  
date: Thu, Oct 23 2013 at 12:51 AM  
subject: Re: TALK TO ME

Okay. I am going to ignore everything you wrote about Kim. I don’t want to know how you figured out that we used to be together (emphasis on used to, as in not anymore), and I don’t want to discuss the idea of putting socks on our door handles, because we are adults and should be able to deal with sex like adults, I.E. without a “system.” As for exhibitionism... _In your dreams._

You know the prisoner who escaped from Bedford Hills? That prisoner is Nick Barrymore’s friend Becky. By “friend” I mean “they know each other through church,” and by “church” I don’t know what I mean. I’m certain it isn’t really church, but I don’t know what it _is_. She’s hiding out somewhere in the woods. He was getting up to signal to her that it was okay to come up to the house and get food. 

So that explains why he’s been acting so shady and why he was signaling at night. It also gives him an alibi for being the spy in the cab: he was running around that day trying to help Becky dodge the police and go to ground. He snuck her in through the open gate I found with Prof. Crane yesterday.

We actually caught him in the act of flashing his light down into the woods. Becky Lufton has another flashlight and she was signaling back. When Win realized what was going on he ran off into the woods after Becky. I think he had some idea about being a hero and catching the villainess. I ran after him and so did Nick. We didn’t get very far before we lost her. We saw _another_ person in the woods, though: a man. He was a lot taller than Becky. 

Then we heard dogs. There must be more than one out there even though Crane only found the one set of prints. I don’t think I’d ever heard a pack in “full cry” before and I do not want to hear it ever again. We ran back to the house as fast as we possibly could.

I thought that the obvious thing to do would be to call Lt. Mills and report that we knew where the prisoner was (not to mention the trespasser, whoever he is) but Win had a sudden change of heart. I think that he just didn’t want to go out in the woods again, but whatever the reason, he declared that we weren’t going to turn Becky in and that that was final.

You have made me do some pretty stupid things, but I don’t like abetting a felony.

Joan

PS: Nick did confess that Becky had told him about the trespasser several days ago, but he didn’t tell anyone because (and I quote) “that would just draw attention to her, wouldn’t it?” So this mystery man is officially another suspect. According to Becky, he has apparently been staying in one of the ruined houses on the property--but she never told Nick which, and I don’t think she’ll be back to Kykuit anytime soon for us to ask. So I know what I’m doing tomorrow.

PPS: Wasn't America Online limited to America?

￼

 

from: **shhhhhhh** <a.bee.ceeper@aol.com>  
to: Joan Watson <j.watson@gmail.com>  
date: Thu, Oct 23 2013 at 12:58 AM  
subject: Re: TALK TO ME

I believe we may not use the same definition of 'stupid.' It is important to always define your terms.

You seem to be making progress on the case; what is your complaint?

With regard to Kim, although I trust that our partnership is the most important aspect of your life, it is not wise to ignore the needs of the body, nor to indulge them with the wrong people.

With regard to America Online, that was the very appeal.

￼

 

from: **Joan Watson** <j.watson@gmail.com>  
to: shhhhhhh <a.bee.ceeper@aol.com>  
date: Thu, Oct 23 2013 at 1:00 AM  
subject: Re: TALK TO ME

I don’t like staying up all night and being chased by dogs!

And, for what it is worth, I don’t like you sticking your nose into my sex life!

￼

 

from: **shhhhhhh** <a.bee.ceeper@aol.com>  
to: Joan Watson <j.watson@gmail.com>  
date: Thu, Oct 23 2013 at 1:03 AM  
subject: Re: TALK TO ME

It is the nature of our profession on both counts.

And, ‘for what it is worth,’ you need not misunderstand. I am aware that on the Kinsey scale you rate perhaps a three or two point five. One could hardly miss it. I simply suggest that more women might be temperamentally suited to you. Perhaps you should take advantage of this opportunity.

￼

 

from: **Joan Watson** <j.watson@gmail.com>  
to: shhhhhhh <a.bee.ceeper@aol.com>  
date: Thu, Oct 23 2013 at 1:05 AM  
subject: Re: TALK TO ME

If it’s our profession why aren’t you here being chased by dogs too?

￼

 

from: **shhhhhhh** <a.bee.ceeper@aol.com>  
to: Joan Watson <j.watson@gmail.com>  
date: Thu, Oct 23 2013 at 1:16 AM  
subject: Re: TALK TO ME

I hate this. But I am going to solve this case. We will talk about the rest later.

* * *

#### Pocantino Hills Estate, outside Sleepy Hollow, NY. October 23, 2013.

Joan tapped the top of the coffee maker.

It did not produce coffee faster.

She tapped it again, harder this time. It felt good. She considered thumping it harder still, but she worried that it might stop producing coffee altogether. If it did, she decided, she was going back to bed, case or no case.

“There’s instant in the cupboard if you’re that desperate.”

It was Nick Barrymore, leaning against the pastel-pink refrigerator, long thin arms folded over long thin torso.

“Thanks,” Joan said.

“I wanted to tell you something.”

She waited.

“I know last night you wanted to call the cops on Becky. And I also know that you didn’t. I wanted to thank you.”

Joan pressed her lips together. “I don’t know that you should be thanking me. I haven’t actually decided what to do. If I thought that the notes were all just a harmless prankster, I have to say, I would rat you out this instant.”

“But we both heard the dogs last night,” Nick said quickly. “They were real and they were really hunting something.”

“Yes.” She poured herself a mug of coffee and let the smell begin to revive her.

“If I tell you something that helps your case—will you promise that you won’t call the cops today either? Or tomorrow?”

Joan wavered, indecisive. She sipped her coffee to cover it. “Will you promise me that Becky won’t hurt anyone again?”

Nick was at least brave enough to look her in the eye. “I can’t. I don’t think she will. But I can’t promise it.”

It would be very easy for Joan to say ‘then I can’t promise not to turn her in either,’ but she didn’t. She couldn’t, actually. She had started the case thinking that it was a joke, but she kept thinking about their panicked run through the woods the night before, the hounds baying behind them, hot on their scent...

She sighed. “At least you’re honest. Fine. I won’t turn her in.”

Visibly relieved, Nick smiled. “Thank you.” He uncrossed his arms, poured himself a cup of coffee. “Okay. I know why Mr. Rockefeller was out walking around Kykuit at night. He was meeting someone named L.L.”

“How do you know?”

“He didn’t use email—only letters. Part of my job is to go to the gate every afternoon and get the mail and when he came back up to Kykuit there was about ten times as much. On the day he died he got a letter without a postmark or a return address. He tried to shred it, but the paper jammed. He had to ask me to unjam it.”

“And you read the letter?”

“Only a little bit, but it said ‘...at nine o’clock. L.L.’”

“You didn’t save it?”

“No, I shredded it for him as soon as the jam was unblocked. Honestly? If he wasn’t so old, I’d have said he was meeting a girlfriend. It looked like a woman had written it.”

Watson raised her eyebrows.

“You know what I mean! Loopy. Cursive. Neat.”

“Do you know anyone with the initials L.L.?”

He did not, but Kim Mortimer did, when Joan (caffeinated and feeling much better) knocked on her bedroom door.

Kim’s things were still in boxes in the far corner of the room, labeled 'Junk' and 'Things' and 'Breakable Things.' One of the boxes, full of books, was open. Joan realized, with a pang, that it included Kim’s journals. She recognized a spine. It was the one Kim had kept while they’d lived together, years ago.

Kim herself was in the midst of email and paper mail and other boring half-intellectual chores when Joan knocked, as evidenced by the detritus strewn across her desk. She shuffled the papers as they made small talk, staying away from the case, talking about how Tim who thought he would be an oncologist actually went into pathology, and how one hyper-butch classmate had grown out her hair, stopped practicing medicine, and given birth to twins. It was the same sort of vacuous stuff they had discussed over dinner, and it made Joan feel more lonely, not less. Her calves ached, mementos of being chased by dogs only hours before.

“I really did come invade your space for a reason,” Joan said. “Do you know someone with the initials L.L.?”

“In what context?”

“Someone Mr. Rockefeller would have known.”

“Nope,” she said quickly. Too quickly. 

“Come on, Kim.”

Kim stared up wide-eyed, palpably projecting innocence. Like Jamie Moriarty, Joan realized. The thought made her stomach flip.

“Kim,” Joan tried again. “I know when you’re lying. Who is L.L.?”

“Luke Lyons,” she said. “He was the groundskeeper here before Nick.”

“Where can I find him?”

“Sleepy Hollow Cemetery,” Kim said, coolly. She pulled her hair back from her shoulders, arranged it in a ponytail, flipped it through itself. “Otherwise, Nick wouldn’t be the groundskeeper.”

For one ridiculous moment, Joan considered the possibility that L.L. was a dead person—but that was stupid. Hellhounds or no hellhounds, ghosts certainly didn’t write notes. What was wrong with Kim? “Do you not want me on this case?”

“I don’t know,” Kim said.

“You don’t know? You asked me to come here, remember?”

Kim looked away, spoke low. “I didn’t think you were going to find anything.”

“Excuse me?”

Kim stood. Joan got the distinct impression that she was trying to turn her height to advantage. “I didn’t think you were actually going to find anything, okay? I thought that there was a prankster. I thought it was a joke. But now there’s a convict on the loose—”

“How did you know about that?”

“Win told me! It doesn’t matter. My point is, this is not what Jacob would have wanted. He wanted Kykuit to be a refuge. He didn’t want police on the property. He wanted it to be a slice of history.” She crossed her arms, shot her weight into her hip. “He wanted it to go to Win, just like it went to him, and to his father.”

What could you say to that? ‘Too bad’? Joan tried. “Nobody likes it when something horrible happens,” she said. “Nobody likes it when there’s a real crime that happens to them. It freaks you out. It ruins what you think was normal.”

“But _you_ think this is normal. You’re used to it now,” Kim said, and Joan knew that this wasn’t really about the case, wasn’t about Winthrop, wasn’t about Jacob. “I thought—”

She drew herself up as tall as she could. “You thought that this was just going to be the, the setting for our reunion. You thought that you would waltz back into my life because now you had a case for me. You didn’t think I would actually care about the case.”

“That’s not how it was,” Kim protested.

“Not entirely, maybe. But it was part of it.”

Joan knew she had been entertaining those same thoughts. She knew she had stood outside Kim’s door more than once, thinking about knocking, thinking about coming in. She didn’t care. She could still hear the baying of the hounds in the distance, the sound of the pack after blood. She could feel the blisters beginning to rise on her toes from the run back to the house. This was not just a setting.

Holmes had taught her that the case meant everything. Medical school had taught her that, too, in a different context. How could Kim have looked at a patient’s death and seen a way to get back with an old girlfriend? She was supposed to be the empathetic one—!

“L.L. isn’t Luke. It’s his daughter. Laura.” Kim opened the door to the hall, stony-faced. “She still lives in Sleepy Hollow. She works at the diner. Now you have what you wanted to know. You can go now.”

* * *

#### Sleepy Hollow Restaurant, Sleepy Hollow, NY. October 23, 2013.

Laura Lyons was faded, as though she had been left out in the sun too long. Her hennaed hair had an inch of strawberry-blonde roots. Her eyes were a watery blue. Her skin was pale and a little loose on her face, heavily powdered. Joan was ten years older than her and looked five years younger.

Laura smoked a cigarette greedily, kicking her heel against the curb. The 'Sleepy Hollow Restaurant' sign flashed above and behind her, red and orange in the late afternoon light. She was still wearing her blue and white diner uniform. Joan looked down at her own tweed skirt and white tights and thought of _Twin Peaks_. She and Kim had watched that show together, when it was on the air.

“Yeah, I asked to see the old man,” Laura said. “I thought he could help me out. He sent me a doll when I was a kid, you know, the big expensive kind with the books that go with? Seemed like if you sent your employee’s kid a doll, you might help her out when she’s grown up.”

“How could he help you?”

Laura shrugged. “I need money.”

“You have a job...”

“Moving away costs more’n I can save.” She ground her butt against the restaurant’s brick wall, dropped it on the ground, rubbed her fingers together as if she could feel the nicotine on them.

“Why do you need to move?”

“You see that guy over there?” Laura pointed at a man sitting in the Starbucks across the street. He was mid-forties, handsome, crisp in a blue Brooks Brothers shirt. He saw Laura’s gesture, raised his cup in her direction. “That’s my ex.”

“Does he go there every day?”

“After work. Says he likes to check up on me. Once or twice he’s checked up on me by driving real slow past my apartment. Once or twice he’s checked up on me by telling my boss I was a delusional drug addict. Different boss each time. I’ve had lots of bosses since we broke up. I used to be a paralegal. Real nice to check up on someone like that, make them lose their job.”

“So you want to get away from him.”

“What do you think?” She fiddled with her pack of cigarettes, shaking one halfway out, pushing it back in. “Takes money to move. Takes more money to disappear. But as it happens I didn’t go see Mr. Rockefeller. I got the money somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“Is that your business?” She did light another cigarette, ashed it again and again, even when there was nothing left to ash.

“Fair enough,” Joan said. “I just wonder—why all the secrecy?”

“Mike? Over there?” Laura gestured. The cherry flared bright as she waved it. “He doesn’t know anything about the Rockefellers and my dad. He’s from Jersey, he doesn’t know people around here, my dad died by the time I met him. I figure, it wouldn’t do Mr. Rockefeller any good to have Mike coming around Pocantino Hills, and it wouldn’t do me any good if Mike starts telling Mr. Rockefeller lies about me. Fine. So I have to come up with a time that Mike won’t be around.”

“And Mike wouldn’t be around because...?”

“Fantasy football. Every Wednesday night since I knew him.”

Joan thought. “And why were you meeting him in the forest? Why not walk right up to the front door?”

“You know who Mike plays fantasy football with? Nick Barrymore, up at the house. I figured, I go in the back way, Nick never has to know I’m there. If I walk up to the house it’s just as bad as going in the front gate. But out in the forest? Can’t see that from the house, not at night, unless you’re carrying a flashlight. I know those woods, I walked in ‘em every day when I was a kid.”

She smoked her cigarette, hastily, like the first one. Joan brushed smoke away from her face, let Laura compose herself.

"Did you tell anyone that you were going to go meet him?" 

Laura shrugged. "Nobody. You know, I’m not a monster. I think sometimes, what if I had been there? What if I’d gone to meet him? Maybe he wouldn’t be dead. I could’ve called a doctor.”

Joan shook her head. “It was a massive infarction. Even if he had been standing in the emergency room of Mount Sinai, they might not have been able to save him.”

“Well.” She smoked, turned her face away from Joan, tapped her foot faster and faster.

“Do you think you’ll be around for a few more days? I mean, if you’re leaving...”

“Nah. I’ll be around. Just promise me you won’t listen to Mike.”

Joan smiled at her, consciously, trying to make her trust. “Never.”

But when she got in the ancient Land Rover and drove away from the diner, she didn’t head back to Pocantino Hills. She headed to the nearest police station, an old building with lots of dark wood paneling inside. Laura’s story bore some examination.

Joan was drumming her fingers against a chest-high counter, waiting impatiently for the receptionist to get around to helping her, when someone greeted her. “Ms. Watson!”

“Lieutenant Mills! I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Where else did you think I’d be?”

“Staking out the train station?”

“They rotate us so we don’t get too bored. What brings you here? Breaks in the case?” 

“Yes,” Joan said. “Do you know a woman named Laura Lyons?”

Mills’ expression said 'yes' immediately. “Scumbag ex-husband. He keeps harassing her, but we can’t do much until he physically threatens her, and he’s too smart for that.”

“So you know she’s looking to leave town?”

“That’s what I’d do if I were her,” Mills said. She led Joan through the busy police station and back to her desk. It wasn’t much more private—it was in the middle of the bullpen—but they weren’t in front of any detainees, at least. Joan, familiar with the atmosphere, steadfastly ignored the charged glances of the men around them. “Now we can talk. How’s Lyons related to the case?”

Joan had known that she’d have to explain it if she came, but it didn’t make it easier. “I don’t think she was physically present when Jacob Rockefeller died,” she said, “but she certainly lured him out of the house that night. She sent him a note asking to meet, but she didn’t keep the date. She said nobody knew they’d made plans together, but I’m certain she was lying. There still isn’t any evidence that he died of anything more sinister than a heart attack...”

“But, what, you think she somehow gave him the heart attack?”

“No, not Laura Lyons herself, but she might have been an accomplice.”

Mills pursed her lips. “Alright. I’m going to level with you. I think there’s something going on here, but until I have something more than an old man with a bad ticker, I can’t do anything on police time.”

“I appreciate that.”

“But Ms. Watson? This is my personal cell number. I’d appreciate it if you called me the moment you have something actionable. Or even if you just come across anything strange. Or creepy. Anything, anytime. All right?” 

“Sure thing.” Joan stuck out her hand. Lieutenant Mills shook it ceremoniously.

“...why, hello, Miss Watson! Or, excuse me, Doctor Watson!”

It was Ichabod Crane, carrying a pumpkin spice Frappuccino in each hand. To Joan’s eyes, his navy-blue coat and military buttons had stopped seeming silly: they were just part of him. The way he was drinking the Frappuccino, on the other hand, was definitely silly. He looked like a puppy with a treat.

“Hello, Mr. Crane.”

“I see you navigated Starbucks all right,” Lt. Mills said.

“Yes, well, it is not so different from the coffee shops that I know, all things considered, apart from the sheer number of foodstuffs they vend. The music is the hardest thing to become accustomed to. To have music at any time one wishes is a blessing, but some of the sounds that those little black boxes emit—!”

Mills cleared her throat and glanced at Watson significantly. “Crane.”

“Oh. Yes. What brings you here, Dr. Watson?”

“Our case. Actually—" Joan got an idea. "Lt. Mills, can I borrow Mr. Crane tonight?”

“ _I_ don’t know. Crane?”

Joan flushed, but Crane saved her: “It would depend on your plans for the evening, Dr. Watson.”

“Well, there are some very interesting Revolutionary-era houses on the Pocantino Hills estate. Since that’s your area of study, and since you were so helpful last time you were at Pocantino Hills...” And, of course, he could serve as backup, if they ran into a trespasser. She was fairly certain that she could defend herself against Becky Lufton, but she was not at all certain that she could do the same against a man who had more than a foot on her and who might be carrying a gun or a knife. If nothing else, Crane would distract an attacker.

Crane’s face lit up. “That sounds very pleasant. I would be honored to escort you.”

Lt. Mills’ facial expression very much suggested that she was stifling a smirk. “Oh-kay. Just don’t do anything Katrina wouldn’t like.”

“Lieutenant, if you are suggesting...?!”

“Uh-uh! I’m not suggesting anything, I’m just saying that you should have a good time. But not _too_ good a time.”

Ichabod looked thunderstruck. Rolling her eyes, Joan headed out the door, her momentum towing the protesting Crane along with her. “Dr. Watson, I would like to assure you that I will behave as a gentleman and will make no untoward advances upon your person—!”

* * *

#### Pocantino Hills Estate, outside Sleepy Hollow, NY. October 23, 2013.

“I apologize for the Lieutenant’s behavior,” Crane said. “I hardly know what she meant by it.”

He had stayed silent throughout the drive to Pocantino Hills, staring fixedly out the window at the fields and trees going by. Joan had let him stew, but it was obviously hard for him to remain quiet for long.

“She was just teasing you,” Joan said, as they got out of the car. “She likes you.”

“It is obvious that the Lieutenant likes me. In fact I like her as well. I have kinship with her unlike anyone I have ever known. What is not obvious is why she would feel the need to cast aspersions upon your good character.”

“Aspersions? Crane, you have a lot to learn about Americans.”

“It is not Americans that puzzle me but Americans of your particular time and place. That women and Negros and Orientals like yourself should be given the vote, their full place in society, the freedom of their men and masters: this, I grant you, is an accomplishment vaster than I should have hoped to see. That your technology allows you to travel at Godlike speeds, that your fields provide such bounty that no one must go hungry, that your doctors have isolated illness down to its smallest particles and can purge it from your bodies—this too I grant is almost a miracle. Indeed in the arts your society is unparalleled: the dramas I have seen enacted, the flavors both subtle and brash, the wide range of song-types and song-styles are so varied and vast that I must admit in these forms you are far more refined than even the Greeks of old. Yet the manners are so different that sometimes I think perhaps I have traveled across the sea to your own China.” Crane shook his head as if to clear it and strode on ahead.

“It’s not as though Oxford is some alternate universe,” Joan called after him. “I’ve been there. Your college students wear Uggs just like ours do!”

Crane turned. “What, Dr. Watson, is the object referred to by ‘an Ugg’?”

“Are you for real?”

He shook his head. “Sometimes, I wonder.”

Joan led him up a thin track, little more than a deer trail, which first hugged the edge of the woods and then delved into them. As they hiked, Joan steeled herself. “My character might be more deserving of aspersions than you think,” she said. “I didn’t ask you to come with me just because they’re old houses. I think there might be a trespasser staying here, and I didn’t want to go alone.”

“The escaped convict?”

“No! No, no. Nothing like that,” Joan backpedaled. “That’s why I didn’t want to tell Lieutenant Mills about this. I thought she’d think that. This trespasser isn't the prisoner. I saw them last night. They were too tall.” Strictly speaking, she hadn’t wanted to tell Lieutenant Mills about it because Lieutenant Mills might get too curious about the real escapee, still hiding somewhere on the property... but the little white lie seemed reasonable.

“Thank you for informing me,” Crane said, after a moment. “I shall do my best to protect you.”

Oddly, the fact that he was not angry about her deception made Joan feel worse. They walked in silence as the trail’s gradient increased, drawing them up a high hill.

At the top of the hill was the house. The forest had grown right up to it, bindweed twining itself around and into the empty windows, but the fieldstone walls were still standing and only part of the roof had fallen in: the trees had protected it from the worst depredations of weather. The houses that had been constructed in more exposed areas had not been so lucky. One of them was right next to the main carriage road leading to Kykuit, and Joan had passed it many times: it was little more than a foundation now.

Crane stopped and looked at the house, then turned and looked down the hill. “I know this place,” he said. He turned around and around like a dog, then ran up to the stoop, looking where the door once was. “I know this place! The Joneses lived here. They were Welshmen, from Merthyr Tydfil. They had a daughter with a harelip...”

For a moment, he looked like Holmes, when Holmes was in the grip of a particularly thrilling theory. Funny that not everyone can become so passionate about things, Joan thought. She herself had never been transported that way, not even hours into a demanding surgery. She was much better at dogged, methodical work, mending torn arteries, abrading dead tissue away until not an atom was left.

“No one in there?” Joan asked him.

“No.”

She came to the door herself, looked inside. It was much as she had expected: empty of any furniture, a floor covered with detritus, a pile of stones fallen from the walls heaped in a corner.

A pile of stones. A pile made by a person? Joan ducked beneath the low lintel and examined them more closely. They weren’t from the walls at all: they were flat flagstones. They weren’t precisely piled, either, as much as they were leaned against each other. They were covering something.

With effort, Joan lifted the capstone off the pile. Beneath it was a sleeping bag in a stuffsack, a rugged lantern-flashlight, and some books inside a gallon-size Ziploc.

Snapping on the latex gloves she had learned to always carry, Joan opened the Ziploc and looked at the books. Two were actually issues of _Railfan & Railroad Magazine_ (June and August 2013). One was the _National Audubon Society’s Field Guide to Insects & Spiders_. The last appeared to be a journal, but when she opened it, a note fell out.

Rage boiled up hot inside. Someone was watching her? The gate guard...? 

“I believe it might be sensible to ‘stake out’ this locale, Dr. Watson,” Crane was saying, but she hardly heard him. “If the inhabitant comes back we will wish to identify them. Perhaps if we summoned the Lieutenant after all?”

She resisted the urge to crumple the note in her hand. Instead she put it back inside the journal and the journal inside the baggie. “Fine.” She dug in her pocket for her phone. No service, as usual.

Crane helped her reassemble the pile of flagstones, fumbling in the quickly fading light. They had just placed the capstone when he froze. “Someone’s coming.”

They pressed themselves against the inner wall of the house. Crane positioned himself closest to the door, using his height and breadth to protect Joan. Whoever it was was whistling tunelessly, not making any attempt to be secret. He was mounting the stoop. “Stop in the name of the law!” Crane shouted.

The approaching man did not stop. He jumped through the empty doorway and engaged in a quick and brutal scuffle with Crane, as Joan tried to stay out of the way. Somewhere around the time that she realized that their adversary was using a single stick was the time that she realized it was—” _Sherlock!_ ”

One good blow to the place where shoulder and neck meet sent Crane reeling. “Watson. A pleasure to see you. Will you please call off your attack dog?”

“He’s not—Crane, this is Sherlock Holmes, my partner.”

Rubbing the place where the last blow had fallen, Crane leaned against the wall of the house and groaned. “Will you tell your partner that there was no need to assault me?”

“Crane. Hm. Interesting. You are the supposed professor, yes? Now is not the time, but we shall have a very informative discussion of your true task here, I am sure. Now. Watson. You located me. Excellent work! I was beginning to worry that I was too clever for you.”

Joan’s hands closed into fists. She felt her breath coming faster and began a mental countdown to slow it. “Sherlock.”

“Of course, you did some quite clever work yourself—finding Laura Lyons, for instance. Very good. I had tracked her down through another route—” 

“Sherlock!” Joan shouted. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Holmes’ face fell as it dawned upon him that she was angry. “I needed freedom to explore the general area of Pocantino Hills,” his hands sketched the terrain, “without anyone knowing of my association with Mr. Rockefeller the Younger.”

“And you couldn’t tell me.”

“I had understood that you were my student. Consider it a test. One you passed with flying colors, I might add—”

“You just said that you were beginning to worry you were too clever for me!” Sherlock opened his mouth to speak, but Joan barged on. “I may be your student, but I am your colleague first and foremost. Just because you do not have to be tested for drugs every four hours anymore does not mean you can ditch me and then lie to me about where you are, explicitly or by omission. I believed that you _respected_ me!”

Holmes was silent. Crane stood stock still, obviously trying to fade into the scenery. Joan continued.

“When I found out that you had followed me, you said that we had a different relationship now. But that was a lie. You had set people to spy on me and my friends this whole time. That is an unacceptable violation of my privacy and I do not have to put up with it. Do you understand that? I can walk away from you right now. And I honestly cannot think of one good reason why I shouldn’t.”

Joan’s vision was blurred with rage. To prevent herself from throwing something, from saying something truly unwise, she walked out of the house, stared at the sky, worked hard to make the muscles in her neck stop spasming. It had gotten dark. The cool wind bathed her face and helped her compose herself.

After a moment, Sherlock followed her out, still silent.

“Is there one reason? One good reason why I should put up with your crap?” Joan asked, her voice steady again.

“Because I would not be—as successful—without you,” Sherlock said. “Because I need your help to catch Erica Carvalho before she kills again.”

“Erica—?”

Crane came out of the house, ducking under the lintel. “Who is ‘Erica Carvalho,’ please?”

To Sherlock’s credit, he did not seem proud of successfully distracting Joan from her anger. He raised his chin, clicked his heels together in military fashion, and began to explain. “The naturalist Erica Carvalho is, indeed, a naturalist. But she has curiously few friends, one of whom is a certain Laura—”

A scream ripped through the night.

“What was that?”

“Hush!” Crane said.

The cry had been loud, but it had come from far off. Now there was another scream, closer.

“Where is it?” Holmes whispered.

“There, I think,” Crane said, pointing.

Whoever-it-was screamed again, closer still, and this time there was a new sound: the sound of a lone dog barking, no, _baying_ for its quarry. 

“No, there,” Crane declared, and crashed off through the underbrush to the west. Joan and Sherlock followed as best they could. They forced their way around bushes and through trees, tripping over roots and fallen branches, stopping to listen for a repetition of the scream or the dog’s howls. 

“Can you see anything?” Watson asked.

“Nothing,” Holmes said—but then “what’s that?”

They heard a low moan. It was on their left. There the stream that cut straight across the Pocantino Hills property ran shallowly in a very deep and narrow bed. There was a shape laying in the water. As they came closer, the shape resolved itself into a person: a person face downward on the ground, head doubled under him at a horrible angle. Joan knew what she was looking at. She knew that the moan had been a death-rattle. The angle of the neck was too extreme for mere paralysis.

“No one brought a flashlight?” No one had. Sherlock took his cell phone out of his pocket and swiped it on. The faint light of the screen illuminated his face in the most eerie possible way, illuminated his blood-smeared fingers, illuminated the body of Win Rockefeller.

It was unmistakable. The blood streaming out of the body’s caved-in skull, soaking its winter hat and mixing with the water of the stream, was the same color as the ripped parka the corpse was wearing—the same parka he had been wearing when he had first come to Holmes and Watson’s brownstone. Holmes scrubbed his hand over his face, then recoiled when he realized that he was getting Win’s blood all over himself.

“Oh my God. We could have stopped this,” Joan said.

Holmes crouched in the stream silently. The water must have been beginning to wick up his pants—it was wicking up Joan’s—but he did not move. Then he said “this is my fault.” He stood. “I knew who was at fault. I did not speak because I wanted the case to be perfect. I wanted to know every piece before I said anything. Now the client is dead. And I don’t suppose you will be remaining my colleague much longer, after today’s revelations.”

It was hard for Joan to be angry with Holmes when the body of a friend was laid out, head smashed like a pumpkin, in front of her eyes. All she could feel was irritation that he was being so dramatic when there were clearly more important things going on.

“We heard his screams and were unable to save him,” Crane added, “not on a battlefield, but on his own land... But what killed him?”

“Fear of Erica Carvalho’s dog,” Holmes said. “She hid it in the woods, in one of the swampy areas. No one went there but her. She frightened old Mr. Rockefeller to death with it. She set it on Win Rockefeller once before—but he made the house before it caught him. This time, he was too far away.”

They stood looking at the body for what seemed like a very long time. Eventually Holmes clapped his hands together and crouched down again, plunging into the stream to lift the body and roll it over.

“What are you doing?” Watson asked. “We have to call the police. We have to—are you nuts?”

Holmes had downright squeaked. He jumped up, laughing. Crane looked at him with equal surprise.

“A woman! A woman! The man is a woman!”

“A woman?”

Holmes bent down to the body again and lifted it, one hand beneath each armpit, to the side of the stream. He pushed the head upwards; it lolled against the streambed. Even in the cell phone’s bluish light, one could see that it was not Win Rockefeller. The features were too thin, the jaw too round. A silver necklace glinted at its throat: a pentacle. Like Nick Barrymore’s earring, Joan realized. “It must be my dear neighbor Becky!”

“Are you sure that laughing is the right response?” Joan asked.

“We can get her!”

Crane looked utterly confused. Joan took pity. “You know the escaped prisoner? She’s been hiding out on the grounds. The groundskeeper is her friend. Win gave him an old jacket for her...”

“...and this Miss Carvalho had trained a dog to track a scent, which the jacket still bore,” Crane completed the thought. “Since she has killed the wrong person, she will have to try again, and you may succeed in catching her this time.”

Holmes raised a theatrical finger to his lips. “Shh!” There was a light flickering in and out of the trees, some ways away.

The trio waited in silence as the light came closer. It was a flashlight-lantern, much like the one Holmes had stashed in the ruined house, and by its light Joan could make out Erica Carvalho’s dark, strong-featured face.

“Joan? Is that you? You’re just about the last person I’d expect to see out at this time of night. I thought you would be back at the house having dinner with—Jesus. Is that—?”

Sherlock swiped his phone on again and let the light fall on the corpse’s slack face. If Erica felt disappointment at discovering that it wasn’t Win Rockefeller, she did not let it show. She looked, in a word, horrified.

“There’s been an accident,” Joan said, not knowing what else to say.

“What happened? Who is that?” Erica stared at the body as though she had never seen one before. Maybe she hadn’t, Joan realized. Had she been at the scene when Jacob Rockefeller’s body was found? 

“Becky Lufton, the escaped prisoner from Bedford Hills,” Holmes told her, not bothering to make his voice less brutal.

“Jesus.” She sat down on the ground where she stood, as though her legs were giving out. After a moment she asked, “has anyone called the police?”

Joan said “Cell phones don’t work here—” just as Crane volunteered “I shall go.” Erica, gathering herself, spoke over them both. “No,” she said, “my house is closest. I just needed to get over the shock. I’ll go back and call.”

“Let me go with you,” Joan offered. To her surprise, Erica agreed.

It was a long, cold, quiet walk back to the house. Thinking of Sherlock’s announcement that Erica was their culprit, Joan dialed—not 911, but the cell phone number for Abbie Mills. Then it was a long, cold, quiet wait at the end of the trail for the police cars and ambulances to show up, and an only slightly less stressful search for the spot where they’d discovered the body. They found Holmes and Crane perched on opposite banks of the stream, their legs dangling over the muddy cliffs, deep in a technical discussion about the firing mechanisms of flintlock pistols with the body propped grotesquely up between them.

The EMTs asked them to move out of the way, but Joan lingered as Abbie took Erica’s statement. Was she too distressed or not distressed enough? It was hard to say. People reacted to death in so many different ways, whether they were involved or not. She had seen that first while she was doing her rotations, then as a surgeon, and then again while she was working with Holmes. One unrepentant murderer they had caught had screamed and cried when presented with photographs of his victims. Yet the first person who had died under Joan’s care, right out of school, had had such a calm and unflappable wife that she had ended up comforting Joan about their mutual loss rather than the other way around.

Joan looked around. Holmes and Crane had moved on from flintlocks to Minié rifles. “Of course they didn’t do much to change military tactics,” Holmes was saying.

But that was wrong. Minié rifles had a profound effect on the Civil War—the shot they used was the forerunner of modern ammunition. Holmes had taught Joan that, when he was teaching her to shoot. He had said that there was no point in learning to use a weapon unless you learned about its history. Then he had told her about an antiques dealer in Leicestershire that had been killed with one of his own weapons, and how knowing about antiques had been vital to breaking the case.

“It seems a prodigious advancement, but I fear I know nothing of modern gunsmithery,” Crane replied. “I know even less about the wars of your country. You shall have to make me your pupil.”

“Hmm,” Holmes said, and proceeded to let loose with a breathtaking barrage of misinformation about American history. Apparently pirates played a major role in breaking a Confederate blockade of Boston. Who knew?

Crane didn’t bat an eye. In fact, he seemed fascinated. Either he wasn’t a history professor or he was the most tolerant person in the universe, because Holmes' fabrications were getting up _her_ nose, and she knew him well enough to realize that he was being intentionally provoking. 

“You all ready to head back up to the house?” Abbie Mills asked, horning in on the conversation. 

“You’re finished with Ms. Carvalho?” Joan said.

“Yep, and it’s getting cold out here. These guys will process the scene just fine without me. You might as well give your statements in comfort.”

Abbie corralled Holmes and Crane, and they drove up to the old manse, a looming dark presence at the top of its hill. Joan used her key to let them into its small entry hall, grateful that the house was large enough that they could talk without waking Kim, Win or Nick. Neither of them needed to be startled with the news of Becky’s death in the middle of the night, though for different reasons. 

“Where’s the best place to take statements?” Abbie asked.

“Probably through here in the living room,” Joan started to say, but Sherlock had already paced down the narrow hall, inspecting the portraits that lined it. He stopped in front of the last portrait, bending over it in the peculiar penguin-like way he had. He crooked a finger, beckoning Joan over.

“Do you know who this is?”

“John Rockefeller Junior.” The portrait’s halo of blond hair, its deep set eyes were just the same as the first day she had come to Kykuit. She looked around the portrait: it was untouched. Nothing had changed. Nothing seemed disturbed in any way.

“Look again,” Sherlock said, and used his hands to block out the hair, the old-fashioned double-breasted suit, everything except the strong lines and planes of John’s face. “Does he remind you of anyone?”

“Erica Carvalho!” Abbie said.

“ _Exactement._ Run him through Photoshop, darken the skin and hair, provide the slightest embiggenment of the ears, and she is the spitting image: deep-set eyes, strong jaw and all. It is the first ability of the top-notch investigator to see through a disguise. Erica Carvalho is just as much a great-granddaughter of John Rockefeller Jr. as Winthrop is. And that means, under the terms of Jacob Rockefeller’s will, should Winthrop die _sans_ a heir of his body...”

“...Erica inherits the lot,” Ichabod finished for him.

“Wait.” Joan pulled Kim’s sketch of the Rockefeller family tree out of her bag. “So she would have to be descended from Jacob’s older sister, Abigail... aren’t all of Abigail’s children supposed to be dead?”

“They are. Abigail, or ‘Babs’ as the family called her, caused quite a family scandal when she married a man named João Carvalho at the courthouse in Tarrytown. It was not his Brazilian citizenship that bothered the family patriarch so much as the fact that João was of Afro-Brazilian extraction. They lived long and had a son, another John, who died on this very property ‘by misadventure’ in the year 2003, just before Dr. Mortimer was hired. Evidently, however, he did not die without issue.”

Joan shook her head. “So did Mr. Rockefeller know she was his great-niece? He couldn’t have. She was in the will as though she was just a professional colleague. Wouldn’t that seem shady to a probate court?”

“Miss Carvalho graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a near-perfect grade point average, before turning her not-inconsiderable talents to entomology,” Sherlock pronounced, “and her records show that she has a measured I.Q. of one hundred and sixty-two. Even assuming the worthlessness of such tests at determining true intellectual potential, a minor detail such as a probate court would not be an obstacle for her. I can think of six separate ways I might deal with such an inconvenience myself.”

“And any person intelligent enough to mastermind a complex plan like this one would be intelligent enough to know that changing your gender presentation is the easiest way to escape notice,” Joan said, the light dawning. “Erica was the one following Win and Kim in the cab. We didn’t even try to get her alibi for October eighteenth, because I’d clearly seen a man’s face. She inherited that strong jaw. A little false stubble, a chest-binder, and anyone would think she was Eric Carvalho, not Erica.”

Lieutenant Mills shook her head. “All right, I still need to take your statements in the death of our escapee, but first I need to know what you plan on doing about Erica Carvalho. As far as I can tell, you’ve got a motive, but you don’t have the least bit of firm evidence linking her to these crimes. Hell, you don’t even have _crimes_. The coroner’s report says ‘natural causes’ for Jacob Rockefeller, and it’ll say ‘misadventure’ for Rebecca Lufton.”

Holmes steepled his fingers theatrically. “Wait and see, ah, Mills, was it? Wait and see. I shall get you your proof before tomorrow is out.”

Ichabod Crane had been bent over the portrait of John Rockefeller Jr., examining it closely. Now he straightened. “The resemblance is unmistakable, I must admit. However, you have failed to consider one very important possibility.” He gazed around with utmost seriousness. “What if the curse of the hellhounds is real?”

“It isn’t.” Holmes said. “If it were, of course, Erica would be exempt from the curse. The manuscript specifically reads—”

“‘That the sons of Mr. Rockenfeller, unto the last generation, shall be chased by hounds from the very depths of Hell, at sunset each night that they spend on the Philipse Manor.’ I have an eidetic memory,” Ichabod said, apologetically.

“Really?” Sherlock asked, then shook the distraction out of his head. “As I was saying, if (as is certainly not the case, because it is insane) there was a curse of ‘hellhounds’ on the Rockefellers, Erica would be exempt, because she is one of Johann Rockenfeller’s female descendents, not his male ones. Of course, if it turns out that her interest in cross-dressing actually hides a burgeoning transsexual identity, the case becomes considerably more complicated.”

“Focus,” Watson said.

“None of these points render hellhounds out of the question, in my estimation,” Ichabod insisted.

“Your own evidence does,” Sherlock shot back. “Watson here informed me that you found traces of a very physical dog. Tell me, do little hellhounds poop in the woods?”

“I know little of hellhounds, but more, I think, than do you, and there is no reason why such a beast might indeed be corporeal. Why, these past few weeks the Lieutenant and myself have encountered any number of—”

“—of strange things in the course of investigating crimes but _never hellhounds yet_ , so I will just be taking your statements about the body and heading home, Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson,” Lieutenant Mills cut in. “Ichabod, I would like you to wait in the cruiser.”

“But—!”

“I know you believe you have something to add to this investigation. I am not saying that you don’t. For right now, though, we’re all tired and I need to get my job done, so will you please wait in the car?”

As he left, Sherlock called after him. “Crane? I collect people. You, however, are an enigma. Your voice suggests Oxford, your language, seventeen sixty-five. This of course is explainable. You are a historian. You spend your days buried in documents of antiquity; naturally you begin to sound like them. You appear not to know the simplest facts about the American Civil War, a topic I would expect a professor specializing in American history to be familiar with. Still, you might be humoring me."

Sherlock rocked on his heels, holding his arms stiffly behind him, deeply immersed in his deductions. "There is only one truly inexplicable matter. I have been unable to identify the make of your coat. Under normal circumstances, I would say ‘bespoke,’ like the rest of your costume, but that particular weight of wool is not a type in modern production.”

Ichabod smiled. “Mr. Holmes, I have the deepest respect for your intellect. Though we are but briefly acquainted, it seems to me that your mind is as wide-ranging as Franklin or Voltaire’s. Yet, to use a modern turn of phrase—‘you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. [Figurative use of “run of the mill” first appears in 1922.](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=run-of-the-mill)


	3. Chapter 3

#### Driving, Sleepy Hollow, NY. October 23, 2013.

The trees whizzed by on either side of the squad car. Ichabod forced himself to look away from them, to turn to Abbie. The green-glowing dials of the car’s ‘dash board’ cast her face into light and shadow. Her face appeared set and determined as she focused on the task before her. He had known she was a lieutenant, had seen her command men, and under normal circumstances he did not begrudge her the responsibility. Having been on the receiving end of her orders this evening, however, he was not in a charitable state of mind. “Was the rest of your evening enjoyable?”

“Gee, you’re pissy.”

“Pissy, Lieutenant?”

Abbie did not look away from the road, for which Ichabod was immensely grateful. Their conveyance was traveling far too fast for such a gesture to be safe, and while she appeared to be an excellent whip, he still felt uneasy at speeds unnatural to man or horse. “I mean, irritated. Angry. You know that I have a job to do, and sometimes you get in the way of me doing it. It isn’t your fault. In your shoes, I’d probably be worse. But you’ve got to accept it.”

“You could at least describe what occurred while I was amusing myself alone in the car.”

“I took statements from Ms. Watson and Mr. Holmes. We told the groundskeeper what happened. That’s all,” Abbie said. “Groundskeeper was pretty broken up.”

Ichabod remembered Joan’s elliptical, tongue-tied explanation of why she wanted him to accompany her to Pocantino Hills. “Did he know the escapee?”

Abbie raised her eyebrows. “If he did, I don’t want to hear about it,” she said. “Lufton’s dead. No need to go dragging in someone for assisting a prisoner on the lam.”

“And here I thought you were a noble lawman.”

“Man?”

“Pardon me. Law-woman.”

"Officer," she corrected, smiling. 

The trees swept by. They thinned out and with great rapidity they had entered Sleepy Hollow. Abbie turned the car down the familiar road leading to the cabin, to Ichabod’s beloved home.

“Lieutenant?”

“Yes?”

“I dreamed about something. Some evil.”

Abbie directed the car to the side of the road, the ‘soft shoulder’ she sometimes called it, and pulled a lever, and turned fully in her seat to face Ichabod. “And when exactly were you planning on telling me this?”

“Now! Now. I did not think it was necessarily relevant—” he cut himself off at her expression, disbelieving. In truth he had hesitated to speak of Katrina to her; he missed his wife intensely, yet any expression of that longing seemed to devalue the deep and true friendship he had developed with this soldierly young woman. And there was the rub: though he had seen the tenderest and womanliest expressions of caring from her, she viewed them as colleagues first and foremost, as brother- and sister-in-arms against the encroaching forces of the Apocalypse. In that light she was right to insist that he speak to her of Katrina, of any information Katrina might give. In that light he was paying her the deepest disrespect by holding back. “Katrina informed me that something was ‘waking.’ She said not what.”

“She was feeling real helpful today, huh?”

“She also said that, in the dream-world, she could protect me, but in the physical world, you could not. That you could not fight the ‘specters of the past.’”

“Are the specters of the past the things that are waking?” Abbie asked, crossing her arms. “Because ‘specters of the past’ could mean almost anything.”

“The hellhounds,” Ichabod said. “They are from the past. To you.”

“Did she _say_ there were hellhounds?” Abbie asked. Ichabod had to shake his head. “And did she say there was anything we could do to stop whatever-it-is?” He shook his head again. “So now I see why you didn’t say anything. Forewarned in this case is not forearmed.”

“She may contact me again,” Ichabod pointed out.

“Or she may not. You haven’t found the psychic telephone yet, I take it.” She rested her hands on the car’s controlling wheel, rested her forehead on those soft brown hands. “I can’t do anything with this, Crane. There’s nothing to do.”

“Which is why I did not burden you with the warning.” But he knew that was a clumsy explanation of his feelings. “Burden is not the best phrasement; what I meant is bother, or disturb, or—”

“I get the picture,” Abbie said. “As much as it might bug me to be out of the loop, I get what you’re saying.”

But she didn’t, of course. “Katrina finds it... difficult... to be trapped so far from me,” he tried. “She seems to admire you, but it would take an unusual woman indeed not to feel jealous of her husband spending so much time in the company of an unmarried miss.”

Abbie digested that. “That how you see me?”

Ichabod looked out the windshield at the black-and-yellow road. It proffered no solutions. “Hardly.”

“That why you were so upset about me joking about her earlier?”

“Precisely.”

It was inconceivable, truly, but Abbie reached over and took his hand where it lay on his thigh. He tensed, feeling her warm fingers wrap round his, feeling the soft pressure on his leg. “Crane, I know you’re an honorable man. That’s why I could tease you about it! But it’s just like you went to sleep and woke up, and when you went to sleep you had a family, and now that you’re awake... yeah?”

“Yea,” Ichabod said.

“There you go.”

“There I go,” he repeated.

“Now you ready to head home and get some sleep? And in the morning, we can finish up some paperwork, and we can try to figure out if Katrina was talking about hellhounds. Okay?” She patted his hand in a sisterly sort of way.

“Okay.”

But all the way back to his home, all the way to his bed, Ichabod felt the ghost of Abbie’s hand on his. He was grateful that he did not dream that night.

* * *

#### Pocantino Hills Estate, outside Sleepy Hollow, NY. October 24, 2013.

In the morning, Joan woke late, as had been her habit since coming to Pocantino Hills. Holmes had been up long before her; she saw him coming up the drive from her window as she dressed. Winthrop was with him, and they were having an intense, close discussion. Presumably Holmes was catching him up on the events of the previous night. He looked like a general giving orders to a trusted lieutenant.

Of course, Win was nothing of the sort. Holmes held him in the kind of friendly contempt that he held most of the world. She had thought she was excepted from that category, had begun to believe his apologies—but after he ditched her...

To make matters worse, she knew that Sherlock’s theory assessed on a purely logical level was sensible. He never proposed a theory that didn’t make sense. But she had misgivings. She couldn’t quite square Erica Carvalho as a cold-blooded killer. But was that just the fact that she found the quality of ‘obsessed with work’ endearing, so she assumed that any truly dedicated scientist could not be a criminal? Or was it that she was angry with Sherlock and grasping at any possible straws to defy and disagree with him?

Kim was just outside Joan’s door when she opened it. Considering knocking or just passing by? Joan wondered. Instead of asking, she just said “good morning.”

“I’m sorry,” Kim said.

It took Joan a moment to realize what she was talking about. “Oh. About calling me out here.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Kim closed her eyes. Her arms were crossed beneath her breasts, pushing them up and out under her soft sweater. “I do worry, though.”

“Do you know what you can do to make it up to me? You can get out of the way. Let me finish the case. Let me make this house safe for Win.”

“And then what?”

Joan wanted to say “and then we can pick up where we left off in med school,” mostly because Kim was chewing on her lower lip and batting her long, long eyelashes and her hair was falling around her face just so, as though they were twenty-five again and so full of life. Joan also wanted to say “and then we say goodbye,” mostly because she didn’t need this shit, didn’t need one more person trying to maneuver her and manipulate her. But what she actually said was “Then we can reopen the subject for discussion.”

“I’ll be looking forward to it,” Kim replied.

When Joan came downstairs, Sherlock and Win were seated at the scarred kitchen table, munching away in companionable silence. “Ah! Watson. Just the person I hoped to see. Young Winthrop has just agreed to aid us in whatever way he can while we are back in the city.” Joan’s surprise at ‘back in the city’ must have showed on her face, because Holmes continued, “I have informed him that you will be leaving your things here, because we will not be gone more than over-night. Just as you and I discussed.”

“Just as we... discussed,” Joan said. “Last night. When we talked. _Very_ briefly.” She didn’t think she was playing along very well, but whatever. Win wouldn’t notice.

“In the meantime, he will take Erica Carvalho up on her offer of ‘drinks anytime.’”

“Will he?” If Holmes was sending Win into the lion’s den, they surely weren’t going to be actually leaving Pocantino Hills...

“Yes, he will,” Holmes said. “He will call her in a few moments to arrange it for five o’clock tonight. He will help us by pumping her for information about the goings-on of the past few weeks. Then, he will walk back to Kykuit, and make note of anything strange along the way.”

Win, a trusted lieutenant, Joan thought. Right. Exactly.

Win gave them a ride to the train station in the early afternoon, chatting happily about how he’d see Joan the next day, about how he’d see Holmes next time he was in New York. Joan was a little sorry to see the old Land Rover go, but it had always only been a loaner, after all. They were disgorged on the platform, Holmes received a manly handshake and Joan a rather too-close hug, and Win sped away, back to _Call of Duty_ or running the property or going through his uncle’s papers until it was time to go and have a beer with Erica Carvalho.

“Are you sure that leaving him on his own was a good idea?” Watson asked. “I mean—I know you don’t actually plan to go back to New York. But if you really think Erica is the murderer...”

“He will be perfectly safe,” Holmes said, and began walking briskly in the direction of the Sleepy Hollow police station.

Watson ran after him to catch up, her purse bouncing against her back. “Holmes, I need you to talk to me.” 

“Why?”

“I need you to talk to me so that I can feel comfortable about what we’re doing. I need to understand what your plan is.”

Holmes looked at her over his shoulder, but kept going, forcing her to walk quickly to keep up. “All right, Watson. I will phrase it simply. Win is our bait.” 

“You’re going to let him just walk into her house?”

“I hardly think she will bash him on the head. It is not her _modus operandi_.”

“But poisoning him might be,” Watson argued.

“You said yourself that the autopsy report showed no unusual chemicals. I have it in writing. Ergo Erica Carvalho is not a poisoner.” 

“Yet.”

“No one would go to the trouble of training an attack dog and then fail to use it. We know that she has trained such a dog. We know that she has trained it specifically to sniff out Winthrop Rockefeller. We know that she has loosed it before, and furthermore, we know that she has not used any other method to kill, although she has had many opportunities to do so. No, Watson, we can be perfectly secure that she will not cry havoc until she knows that Winthrop Rockefeller is alone in the forest.”

“But you don’t intend to actually leave him alone.”

“Certainly not. What do you take me for?” Holmes hauled open the door to the police station and held it for her, his free hand behind his back. “That is the reason for our visit to your good friend Lieutenant Mills.”

Watson could have sworn up and down that Holmes had never been to the Sleepy Hollow police station, but he wound his way unerringly past the protesting secretary and into the bullpen. Abbie Mills was at her desk, speaking in low, intense tones with Ichabod Crane. Their heads snapped up when they saw Holmes and Watson.

“To what do we owe the pleasure?” Ichabod asked, formally extending a hand to Holmes and then (after beginning a motion that looked like a bow) extending the same courtesy to Watson.

“I require transport to Pocantino Hills. Specifically, I require transport to the Rockefeller State Park Preserve, from which location I plan to enter the Pocantino Hills estate through a broken gate.”

Lieutenant Mills looked at him in disbelief. “I thought you said you were going to bring me proof of a crime, not haul me out of the police station at a moment’s notice.”

“Plans change, Mills,” Holmes said brusquely.

“I must lodge my opposition to this course of action,” Professor Crane said. “I believe that we are severely underestimating the threat that lurks in Pocantino Hills. The precise nature of the threat remains unknown, it is true, but I have reason to believe it may be supernatural in origin and, by your lights, quite ancient—”

Mills shot him a quelling, not-in-front-of-the-parents sort of look. “As a matter of fact, Crane and I were just about to go speak to Laura Lyons. That was a course of action that you recommended, Mr. Holmes.”

Holmes shrugged. “And there is no need to abandon that course of action. Lieutenant Mills can ferry me to Pocantino Hills, where we shall bag our criminal; Watson, you might accompany Professor Crane to interview Ms. Lyons.”

Watson considered saying no, saying “where you go, I go,” but Holmes mouthed “please distract the crazy man” to her and she had to accept that he might be right. Crane and Mills seemed to do everything together, but Crane was an Oxford professor, not a police officer or even a consulting detective. Even without his crackpot theories about hellhounds, it might be best for him to sit out a confrontation with a violent murderer.

“I know how to format interview notes for your files,” Watson offered. “I carry a tape recorder everywhere I go.”

Mills and Crane exchanged a look, but it was clear who was in the driver’s seat. “All right,” Mills said. “I’ll come. Crane, you’ve got it with your phone?”

“Got it,” Crane said, holding up a flip phone of the sort marketed to elderly people. Its buttons were the size of quarters. “I feel certain I can operate it, and its battery appears to be fully charged.”

“I’m only a call away,” Mills told him. 

“Indeed, Lieutenant.”

That’s doomed, Joan thought, don’t you know that there’s no cell coverage there? But she had said she’d back Sherlock up, and that meant not throwing any wrenches into the works. Mills would have the police radio if she needed it, in a pinch.

Holmes was nearly vibrating with his desire to leave as Lieutenant Mills gathered her coat and firearm and car keys. Joan watched them go, not sure whether to be happy that this was not a bona fide ditch or whether to be upset that she had been relegated to babysitting duty. They did not split up often, all things considered; she decided that the only reason she was feeling particularly irritated by Holmes’ actions was that they were an extension of what he’d done earlier in the week. That, she reflected, she had still not decided to forgive him for. That, she was not certain she _could_ forgive him for, even after sleeping on it.

“To the Sleepy Hollow Restaurant we go! May I escort you?” Crane asked, extending an inviting arm.

Joan was used to Sherlock’s odd courtliness, but this was a bit beyond. “Sure,” she said, and took it.

“I am given to understand that Mrs. Lyons does not complete her tasks until five o’clock,” he said. “In the mean time, perhaps we might consume a late luncheon at the establishment where she works.”1

* * *

#### Sleepy Hollow Restaurant, Sleepy Hollow, NY. October 24, 2013.

“So what is it now?” Laura Lyons slid into the chair next to Ichabod’s. “And who’s Paul Revere?”

“Not I,” Ichabod muttered, shifting in his uncomfortable red vinyl seat. Why people in this time could not simply use leather, he would never understand.

“This is Ichabod Crane,” Watson said, folding her hands deliberately. “He’s a consultant for the Sleepy Hollow police department.”

“You have a union or something?”

Why did everyone assume that Ichabod was romantically interested in any woman he might be seen with? But Dr. Watson simply smiled like it was a not-so-funny joke. “No, but we both have an interest in the case of Mr. Rockefeller’s death. Are you familiar with a woman named Erica Carvalho?”

Ichabod felt Mrs. Lyons tense in the seat next to him. “Yes.”

“How familiar?” Watson’s face was impassive, but her brown eyes searched Mrs. Lyons’.

“We’re friends.” She paused. “We’re in a group together.” She paused again. “The Sisterhood of the Radiant Heart. A Wiccan group.”

“Wiccan?” Ichabod asked, though Watson shot him a quelling glance. “Witches? You do mean _witches_?”

“Yeah, Wiccan,” Mrs. Lyons snapped. “And no, we don’t turn people into toads, and you aren’t invited to a ritual watch us runnin’ round skyclad. You’d be surprised what important people are interested in witchcraft.”

“Skycl—?”

Watson slapped both hands on the table, just loudly enough to interrupt their tête-à-tête. “Nobody is insulting your religious beliefs, Laura. We suspect that Erica Carvalho might have had something to do with the death of Jacob Rockefeller. Now, if you can remember anything that she said to you, anything about Mr. Rockefeller...”

Laura’s face had drained of blood, but it was indignation, not fear. She shook her head, tossing too-red hair. “No. Not Erica.”

“I know she’s your friend. I know it’s hard to think that she might have done something bad. But if she hasn’t done anything wrong, it’ll only help her for you to tell us about what happened. So, for example, did she know that you were going to see Mr. Rockefeller that night?”

Laura shook her head again. “You got it all wrong. Yeah, she knew I was going to see the old man, but she didn’t tell me to do it. She told me to _cancel_ our meeting. She even offered to give me the money I needed. She said I had to make sure he never went outside at night, or else something bad was going to happen.”

If there was a coven of witches in Sleepy Hollow... If, as seemed indubitably to be the case, there were _two_ covens, one of which both Nick Barrymore and Rebecca Lufton were a part, one including Laura Lyons and Erica Carvalho... Ichabod’s blood ran icy cold in his veins. “Did she tell you what, exactly, was going to happen?”

“Look, it was stupid. You’re going to think it’s stupid. But I swear it’s true.”

“Neither of us will regard you as stupid, or mad, or anything else. Trust us, Mrs. Lyons.” Ichabod found himself at a loss, at sea in this strange time and place. How could he communicate his good intentions? How could he show her his trustworthiness? Would taking her hand be appropriate?

“She had an old book. It said there was a curse. Ghost dogs that would come after Mr. Rockefeller if he went outside.”

“Was the page in the book like—Dr. Watson, do you have it?”

Wordlessly, Watson retrieved the page from her purse. A story from the Tappan Zee, the first line read.

“Yeah,” Laura said. “That’s it.”

Ichabod stood. “Mrs. Lyons, I hope you will forgive my immense rudeness. Dr. Watson, time is of the essence.” He strode out, ignoring Watson’s muffled curse as she threw money down on the table and rushed to follow him.

He was out the door and halfway to the police station before Watson caught up. Though her features were foreign, the look she bore was familiar: bewilderment and pure concern. “What is wrong with you? You’re as bad as—” she cut herself off. “So Sherlock is after the wrong person. So what?”

“Erica Carvalho is part of a coven of witches—a good coven. If she was trying to protect Jacob Rockefeller, then he was truly in danger, and so too is Winthrop. Do you understand?” Ichabod stared at the phone, trying to navigate while he figured out the hellish little device.

“You’re saying that the hellhounds are real. As in really hellhounds. Not just a pack of dogs.”

“Real and coming after Winthrop Rockefeller tonight, if we do not protect him.”

Watson’s lips tightened, pressing together so hard they nearly disappeared into a thin line. “This is insane. This is literally insane. You have gone insane.” She watched him struggle with his phone. “And you know, that won’t work, even if you do figure out how to dial it. Lieutenant Mills won’t get reception. Nobody does.” 

Ichabod knew ‘reception.’ Of course. What an idiot he was, not remembering the simplest lessons from the previous night’s events: if cell phones worked in Pocantino Hills, Dr. Watson and Miss Carvalho would not have needed to leave the body in order to call the Lieutenant. He shoved the phone into his pocket. “Dr. Watson, I do not care if you believe that I am a raving madman. You may come with me, or you may stay behind, but I am going to Pocantino Hills.” He sped into the police station’s parking lot, his ground-eating stride forcing her to trot to keep up, ignoring her distress. There was a time and a place for gentlemanly behavior, by God!

“How are you going to get there? We don’t have a car!”

“Do we not?” Ichabod rounded the nearest police cruiser, pulled open the door and slid into the driver’s seat. As he had expected, the keys dangled from their keyhole, just as Lieutenant Mills left hers when she was at the station.

“We can’t steal a car!”

Ichabod turned the key, trying to remember which of the foot-pedals propelled the monstrous hunk of metal forward. The big one, he was certain. No. The small one. And first the lever next to the ‘steering-wheel’ had to be moved to ‘D’—

Joan got in.

Ichabod pressed the large pedal down. It had no salutary effect.

“Are we going?” she asked.

“I thought we were,” he said. Ah, the lever was on ‘N.’ How had he mistaken it? He moved it to its proper position, ‘D,’ but in the process hit a button or lever or dial that caused fluid to squirt from an unseen reservoir and trickle down the windshield. “Blast it!”

“Do you know what you’re doing?” 

“Yes!” he snapped. Then, “Lieutenant Mills has been teaching me.”

She sighed. “Get out. I’ll drive.”

* * *

#### Pocantino Hills Estate, outside Sleepy Hollow, NY. October 24, 2013.

By the time that Joan managed to get them to the turn-off to Erica Carvalho’s house, and by the time they had blundered up a rough trail for a quarter-mile to her doorstep, she had had plenty of leisure to imagine Holmes’ reaction to their horning in on his stake-out, and she was more than happy to let Ichabod take the lead. The house was small, nearly flat-roofed, its lines broken by no chimney or decoration but only by a lean-to addition on its right side. Ichabod did not bother to knock on Ms. Carvalho’s door at all; he simply burst in, and Joan followed.

They discovered a cozy scene: Erica and Win sitting across a small dinner table from each other, beers in hand, heads together in intimate conversation. The room smelled of sage smoke. A radiator beneath the front window kept the air warm. The door to the inner room was open, and through it Joan could glimpse an armchair and a bed, Erica’s things strewn about. She had a strong sense of being an intruder.

“Miss Carvalho! Mr. Rockefeller! Please excuse our abrupt appearance. I hope we have not inconvenienced you to too great a degree?” Ichabod looked around awkwardly.

Reluctantly, Joan jumped to his rescue. “I realize that this is going to sound a little bit out there. But, Erica, you said you believed in hellhounds. Did you really mean that?”

Erica stood, her arms reflexively crossing over her chest. “Yes,” she said, “Stupid as it sounds. But what—”

The door slammed open. “What in the name of little green apples are you _doing_ , Watson?” Holmes shouted, bursting in with Abbie Mills at his heels. He hardly glanced at Erica Carvalho, or at Win, whose eyes were the size of dinner plates.

“I know that you don’t believe—” Joan began, but he didn’t let her finish.

“I asked you to perform one simple task. One task, for the good of our partnership, to catch a killer,” he could not resist gesticulating at Erica, “and you could not do that much, out of what, spite? For my ‘bad behavior’ in sleeping with your friend? Or for my ‘bad behavior’ in not including you in every minor detail of this investigation?” He seemed ready to go on, his fists clenching at his sides.

“No,” Joan said. “Stop.”

“I know you are angry with me. I know—”

“You don’t know, because you won’t listen to me!” she said, and with that she reached deep inside herself to find that core of inner calm and certainty that she needed, the core that had served her so well as a sober companion. “Sherlock, I need you to be quiet, or I need you to leave the room and allow Lieutenant Mills and Mr. Crane and I to speak with Ms. Carvalho.”

Holmes subsided, still vibrating with frustration.

“Now. Ms. Carvalho. We know that you were behind some of the incidents with dogs that have happened over the past few days. But your friend Laura told us some things that seem to complicate the issue. Would you like to explain what has been going on?”

Erica looked from face to face. Her gaze finally settled on Win, and seeing them together, Joan realized how similar they looked. They might have been siblings, if not for their vastly different skin and hair. As the last rays of the afternoon sun slanted down onto Erica’s obstinately Rockefeller face, she told her side of the story.

“If you’re here at all, I guess you’ve figured out that I’m Win’s cousin.” Win himself hadn’t, and his surprise was almost comical, but Erica ignored it. “I didn’t grow up knowing about the family. My mom got pregnant with me and didn’t want my dad in the picture, and he never told anyone about me. But when he died, my grandma Babs went through his things and and found out that I existed.

“So Grandma Babs got in contact with me. My mom isn’t the greatest person in the world, so Grandma Babs put me through college. I changed my name to Carvalho after her and my dad. But she didn’t talk to the Rockefellers, because they didn’t talk to her, because of Grandpa João. She made sure I knew that my dad had tried to go back to reconcile with the family, and that he’d died because of the curse on Pocantino Hills. Jacob had said my dad was drunk and tripped over a root in the forest, but Grandma knew better. She said her brother always was stupid about some things.

“Then I went to grad school and started studying entomology, and Grandma Babs died, and Jacob wrote me a letter of condolence. So we talked, and we got to know each other pretty well. We both loved bugs and insects, and it's hard to find other people like that, you know? When I started having trouble with my advisor he told me that I could come study _Nicrophorus americanus_ at Pocantino Hills—so I could finish my Ph.D. I told him not to come stay at Kykuit. I told him about the curse. I swear I tried to explain to him about the curse.” Erica’s face was guileless, shining bright with excitement. “But he wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t believe in superstitious bullshit—how he put it.

“He told me that even if the curse was real, the word ‘sons’ meant ‘heirs.’ And he showed me his will. He’d made it out so that I would inherit after Win. He was so proud of himself. He knew I didn’t want the money, but he thought he was proving that there wasn’t any curse, since I was a heir and I’d been staying at Pocantino Hills for months and nothing had happened.

“Well, he was wrong. He died. He went outside after sunset and he died. So I started trying to think about how to save Winthrop.”

“And that’s when you bought a dog?” Watson asked.

Erica nodded. “I figured that nobody would believe me telling them about a curse. Who believes stuff like that? But I couldn’t risk actually letting Win go out after sunset. So instead I got Moxie, and I trained her to chase him...”

“But you didn’t encourage Win to go out after sunset, only before sunrise,” Watson said, understanding. “If you read the curse carefully, you see that it only applies before midnight.”

“Right.”

Lieutenant Mills finally felt safe enough to holster her gun. “What about the little notes?” she asked. “'Beware'?”

Erica nodded. “That was me. I had to get something with Win’s smell on it, for Moxie, as soon as I possibly could. I figured I might as well make sure you all knew about the curse, at least. I went in disguise.”

Mills cocked her head. “And then you let Moxie just run loose in the forest to chase that criminal over a ledge?”

“No! That was an accident. She got out. Moxie wouldn’t hurt anyone—she looks scary, but she’s only trained to find, not to kill. She’s never bit anyone in her life!”

“That statement, at least, is quite easy to corroborate or disprove,” Holmes said. “I believe the dog in question is secreted in the shed on the back corner of your little clearing, not in her usual kennel? Yes, I know about the little island in the marsh where you’ve been keeping her. You would not mind providing us with a demonstration?”

Win, who had been inching his chair backwards, stood up in alarm. “No. That dog was fucking terrifying, man. It is not getting _near_ me.”

“She wouldn’t hurt anyone!” Erica insisted. “It’s perfectly safe! Win, don't you know I wouldn't?”

Win did not seem convinced.

“One way to find out,” Holmes said. “Winthrop!” He grabbed the young Mr. Rockefeller by the wrist and with remarkable strength pulled him briskly out the door.

Joan, Lieutenant Mills, Ichabod and finally Erica followed as Holmes dragged Win behind the house. There was certainly a dog inside the shed. It was yelping and whining, obviously unused to being kept confined.

“We shall see what we shall see,” Holmes said, and wrenched the door open.

The biggest, blackest, droolingest dog Joan had ever seen bounded out of the shed, visible only by the sheen of its coat in the early evening darkness. The dog whipped its head around, looked directly at Erica, and then seemed to catch a scent—and launched itself at Win.

It landed one paw on each of his shoulders and vigorously washed his face with its tongue, barking happily all the while.

“Moxie! Down!” Erica shouted, running over to Win and grabbing the dog’s paws to pull it off him. “Bad girl. No kisses. You know no kisses, Moxie. Sit!”

Still sniffing the air, completely entranced by Win, the dog sat, her tongue lolling out as Erica scratched her head and grabbed her collar. 

“Well, that answers that question,” Lieutenant Mills said.

“Congratulations, Carvalho,” Holmes said. “It seems you are not a killer. The supernatural aspect of this case, however, has yet to be proven—”

“We shall be able to address that point directly,” Ichabod Crane pointed out. “The sun has fallen beneath the horizon, and young Mr. Rockefeller is out-of-doors. Therefore, I would expect the hellhounds to appear—now.”

They all fell silent. The only sound was Moxie, yelping. They waited long enough that Joan was almost ready to say “well, so much for that.” Then, in a frantic burst, Moxie shook off Erica’s grip and ran into the house, whimpering, tail between her legs.

From the distance came the bone-chilling sound of a pack of hounds, baying as they caught the scent of their prey. The sound was as different from Moxie’s happy vocalizations as the scream of a dying man from the shouts of playing children. With a sinking feeling, Joan realized that the sound was too close to be anywhere but on the trail to Erica’s house—on the trail between the house and the cars.

“Does single-stick combat work on dogs?” Joan asked.

“I’ve got something better than a stick,” Abbie said, unholstering her gun.

“I do not believe that mortal weapons shall prove efficacious against spectral hounds,” Ichabod pointed out, “even if they are physically embodied.”

“You have any ideas?”

“Yes, actually,” Crane said. “If you all will follow me...?”

He led them around the house and inside, bolting the door behind them. Holmes wedged a chair beneath the doorknob to brace it further. Moxie fled into the back room, yelping, to hide herself under the bed. “I know this house well,” Crane said. “I know _all_ the houses here well—they have not changed since I was stationed here with the Army.”

Crane paced the room, measuring it out with his steps. “Mr. Holmes selected the home of the Joneses to serve as his temporary abode. The manor house of Kykuit is built on the spot where the Vanderark family once lived. And this property was inhabited by a man by the name of French.”

The hounds bayed outside, muffled now by the walls of the house but still clearly coming closer.

“Mr. French bred the best hounds in the New World,” Crane said, but Holmes had not needed the extra hint. He was already inspecting the walls and wooden floor of the lean-to addition where a modern oven had been installed.

“The curse! This is the house where the dogs’ bones are buried,” Erica Carvalho said.

Watson pulled the crumbling old piece of paper in its Ziploc bag from her purse and read along with Win and Lieutenant Mills:

> The Wife of Mr. French was _unamus’d_ , and being a Witch-Woman set a Curſe upon Mr. Rockenfeller, by means of killing the famous Dogs, and _boyling_ them, and _burying_ their Remains beneath the Hearth-Stone of her House.

“Crane!” Holmes shouted from where he was inspecting the place where the wall and the floor met the refrigerator’s base. “Did the French family home have one or two rooms?”

Now, how could he possibly know that? Joan wondered. But Crane closed his eyes, as if remembering something, and announced, “One room. This partition is a later addition.”

“Excellent,” Holmes said. He opened the door between the inner and outer rooms, felt the wall on either side of it with careful fingers—then seized a frying pan from the stovetop and began to bash away at it.

“What are you _doing_?” Erica shouted.

The plaster, old and cracking, began to fall away, revealing not the logs that Joan would have expected to see—but a stone chimney.

From the front window, Win shouted. “I see them—!”

Abbie and Joan ran to his side, pressed their faces against the window to see through the glare and into the night. Win was right. The dogs were bigger than Moxie, bigger than Joan had ever seen. They were blacker than darkness, blacker than anything Joan could name, yet their outlines glowed with an ethereal green light. It was as though the air was filled with bioluminescent phytoplankton.

“I have seen this episode of _The X-Files_ ,” Abbie said, deadpan, “and it ended with everyone getting killed by radioactive goddamn fireflies.”

“Except Mulder and Scully,” Joan responded reflexively.

“I’m Scully,” Abbie said. “You’re too tall.”

“Hey, I’m not that much taller! And I’m the doctor.”

Holmes had moved on from the wall and was attempting to pry up a floorboard. “If you are quite finished with your bonding experience, you might wish to consider helping us excavate,” he said. “Before they get in?”

“I thought you didn’t believe in hellhounds,” Erica said.

“If they are only real, physical dogs, Lieutenant Mills can shoot them,” Holmes pointed out. “In the meantime, I have an excellent excuse to dig up your floor. I find it highly satisfying.”

The dogs were outside the door, baying, scrabbling at the walls with claws that sounded very, very real. Then there was a huge _thump_ , not caused by the frying pan or the shovel that Erica had produced from somewhere. One of the dogs had bodily launched itself at the door. Then they were all doing it, and the door was shaking on its hinges.

“Winthrop, I’m gonna need you to get back away from those windows,” Abbie said. Win followed her orders, a big helpless boy protected by a tiny, fierce warrior.

“I still don’t see why we’re digging up the floor,” Joan said.

“Purportedly, salting and burning the bones that once belonged to a vengeful spirit will release them from this earth forever,” Holmes said.

“Dig faster,” Ichabod said.

“Right. Well. I’ll go find salt. And anything that burns.” Beneath the bed, Moxie whined. Outside, the dogs howled, biting at the door and its hinges with their teeth.

By the time Joan heard “Hallelujah!” from the diggers, she had found salt, matches, nail polish remover, perfume (Yves St. Laurent’s ‘Opium'), a bottle of gin, and a variety of household cleaners. She rushed to see what they had discovered. The bones were yellowed, covered in dirt, almost unrecognizable, but she knew what animal they came from.

“You’d better be done,” Abbie told them. “Look at that door.” As she spoke, the front door splintered. A slavering muzzle appeared in the hole, then grabbed onto the wood itself with wickedly long teeth and pulled another chunk free. The ethereal glow that seemed to hang around the dogs was not diminished, even in the cabin’s bright electric lights.

Abbie raised her gun, sighted and shot, the sound as loud as a firecracker in the enclosed space. 

Nothing happened.

“You missed,” Win said.

“She did not miss,” Holmes said cheerfully. “The bullet traveled directly through the hole in the door. It would appear that the dogs are indeed spectral. Who would have thought?”

Ichabod took the nail polish remover from Joan’s arms. “What is this mixture?”

His question shook her out of slackness. “Flammable,” she said. “Pour it on the bones. Have we got them all dug up? Do we need to have all of them?”

“No time for that!” Abbie shouted. “Someone want to move a sofa in front of that door or something, for God’s sake?”

Joan assumed Sherlock would do it. She was too busy pouring salt on the bones, then uncapping each bottle and pouring it on, choking with the fumes—she couldn’t get the perfume bottle open, smashed it instead, the heavy scent of Opium mixing sickeningly with the chemicals—and when the bones were thoroughly soaked—

“Stand back!” She took her own advice, then threw a match on the pyre.

The conflagration was much larger than she had expected. She jumped back reflexively. It took her a moment to realize that her jacket was on fire. Stop drop and roll, she thought, but before she could put the maxim into practice Winthrop was already beating the flames out.

It had not just been a momentary fireball. The bones were burning with satanic fury, turning the whole doorway into an inferno. Already the fire was beginning to lick up onto the ceiling. It wasn’t how fire was supposed to work! It wasn’t possible—but it was happening. But when she looked to the door, there was no more eerie green light, no more unearthly baying, no more snapping jaws.

“Ichabod!” Abbie yelled into the fire. “Ichabod! Can you hear me?”

“We’re all right!” Erica’s voice came from the other side of the doorway. “But—the house is burning. The house is _burning up_. Holy shit. Will one of you guys please pick up the laptop on the table? It has my dissertation on it!”

“Can you get out?” Joan yelled.

“There’s a window. Moxie jumped right out—so the dogs are gone?”

“Yes! Get out!”

“Get my computer!”

“I’ve got it,” Winthrop confirmed.

They ran.

Twenty minutes later, they stood watching as the roof of the house began to cave in.

* * *

#### The Sleepy Hollow Restaurant, Sleepy Hollow, NY. October 25, 2013. 

It was two of the clock; no one was stirring in the village of Sleepy Hollow, save for the few who lingered at the Sleepy Hollow Restaurant; yet every street was lit with yellow lamps, and every sign was illuminated with the unearthly glow that Lieutenant Mills said emanated from neon gas, even brighter than the embers that remained of Erica Carvalho’s little house.

Within the Sleepy Hollow Restaurant there was food and drink, though no beer or spiritous liquors. There were friends as well: the little posse who had survived the hellhound attack, and Laura Lyons too. She was pulling a double shift, she said, and was glad of it indeed, for she could see that Erica was all right; and they embraced as sisters. She served them food on the house and they told their story and toasted Winthrop’s survival in weak coffee.

Ichabod watched Lieutenant Mills spar with Holmes with great pleasure. If she were a fencer, she would have used a heavy saber. Holmes could dodge her swings, formidable though they might be, yet he could get none of his own through her unshakable guard. “And yet, Mills—” Holmes had progressed to the casual use of the Lieutenant’s last name alone, as though they were male friends, Ichabod realized “—you continue to cover up the true origins of your partner.”

The 'partner' was Ichabod. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” he started to edge in, but Lieutenant Mills talked over him.

“Ichabod? He’s from 1776.” She raised an eyebrow. “And that has nothing to do with the question of what exactly you thought you were doing when you let Moxie out of that damn shack.”

“1779, actually,” Ichabod corrected. It seemed rather important that she get that detail right.

Holmes was silent. So was everyone else at the table.

Eventually Doctor Watson ventured, “Well, that does explain some things. Right?”

“Time travel?” Winthrop asked, bewildered.

“Not exactly,” Ichabod said. “I believe it was more along the lines of a resurrection.”

The only one unfazed was Erica. “Wait. Wait. Ichabod Crane. Ichabod Crane! Oh my God! I’ve read about you. You’re in the _Book of Days and Darknesses_!”

“The _Book of Days and Darknesses_?” Ichabod could not help but ask. It was one thing to hear of the exploits of his long-dead friends, another to discover that after all his name had been passed down through history. He had thought himself entirely forgotten.

“It’s a grimoire—a very old grimoire. Passed down from one of the earliest members of my coven,” Erica explained. “I wonder if you knew her? Her name was Katrina Van Tassel...?”

Of course it was.

The revelation led to questions, and more questions, and Holmes demanding Ichabod’s electronic mailing address to consult with him on matters of history and magic, and Lieutenant Mills promising to teach him to use electronic mail (for Ichabod had not yet begun to understand the mysteries of computers), and Winthrop beginning to try to pick Erica’s brain over her coven and what it meant to be a Wiccan.

The past and the present were tied together: Ichabod knew that. He was living proof of it. Some things were handed down by person to person through the ages: spellbooks, Freemasonry, the land that was called Pocantino Hills. Others lay dormant until the time was right, like prophecies, like Ichabod himself. Yet others were obliterated by human hands. No future generation of Rockefellers would be chased down as a result of Johann’s spitefulness.

“A good night’s work,” Ichabod murmured to himself.

“Indeed,” Sherlock Holmes replied.

* * *

Dear Mr. Holmes,

from: **Ichabod Crane** <ichabodcrane1799@gmail.com>  
to: shhhhhhh <a.bee.ceeper@aol.com>  
date: Sun, Oct 27 2013 at 9:33 AM  
subject: Dear Mr Holmes,  


Dear Mr Holmes, I am not yet acustom’d to this manner of Communication. I trust that you shall exercise Patience with me. Among other Concerns, I seem to have adress’d you at least 4 times. Lt. Mills insists that I must develop the skill of ‘Typing’ despite the existence of a Machine referred to as a ‘Scaner’ which might easily dupplicate my properly written Misives. I have also been inform’d that my Spelling is ‘terrible’ and that I must mind the red Lines beneath misspel’d Words. However it is not obvious to Me how red Lines will inform me of the correct Spelling of any thing. I have received your Letter on the subject of the shape of the Island or rather Penensula of Boston during my time in that fair City. I regret to write that I have no Points of Reference for the current City Lines and Limitations and cannot answer clearly at this Juncture despite consulting several Maps. From the elevations you have listed it is clear that the City is radically changed. There are no Hills where Hills there once were. Also I have been reading carefully on the Subject of the Civil War, or as some Historians seem to call it the War between the States. It was extremely cruel of you to tell such insidious Lies to an ignorant Foreigner. Lt. Mills has had to disabuse me of several Ill-Conceiv’d Notions as a result of your Trickery. I understand your Reasoning and yet I must deplore it. I trust that in Future you shall behave better. Also I must inform you that we have had a resurgence of the Headless Horseman’s Activities and therefore I will be possibly out of contact for some time. If we are in need of you Lt. Mills will, of course, call upon you, and until that time I remain your frend, ICHABOD CRANE. 

* * *

(no subject)

from: **Joan Watson** <j.watson@gmail.com>  
to: Kim Mortimer <kimortimer@yahoo.com>  
date: Wed, Oct 30 2013 at 10:01 PM  
subject: (no subject)  


Kim,

I know you’ve been waiting for me to email.

I know you’ve really trusted me about the hellhounds. I know that it isn’t easy for you to accept what we saw and what happened.

I know you want this email to say “yes, let’s get back together.” But I can’t say that. What I can say is, look me up next time you’re in the city, okay? I know I was wrong when we were in med school. I know I didn’t have to end things and I know that you deserved better. But that’s in the past and it won’t do any good for me to drop what I’ve built in my life now, for you. And maybe now you understand a little better why what I’m doing is so important.

I really mean it when I say I want to be your friend, by the way. And who knows what else. I just think that I have to take things slower than ever now. Maybe after what happened with Mr. Rockefeller you can understand that. You come to a point in your life when everything changes, and for a little while you’re feeling out all your new decisions, and that’s where I’m at.

I think Sherlock actually wants to be friends too, by the way.

See you soon...? I hope...?

Joan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Of course, Laura Lyons’ married name was not Lyons. Like many modern women, she chose to cease using the name of her abusive ex. However, before the advent of the universal “Ms.,” divorced women continued to be referred to as “Mrs.,” and Ichabod is following that protocol.

**Author's Note:**

> Although the Rockefellers are a real family and Pocantino Hills is a real place, neither is anything like what I have described in this story. (In fact if you are ever in the vicinity of Sleepy Hollow, I highly recommend visiting Stone Barns at Blue Hills, which is a very fine restaurant and working farm on the Pocantino Hills estate.) I have also messed with the geography of Tarrytown & Sleepy Hollow to create a more compact area for my characters to run around in. 
> 
> Thank you to [kallooh](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kallooh), [Imaginary Circus](http://archiveofourown.org/users/imaginarycircus), & Nick Montfort for beta reading and support. Thank you to my NY friend John for advice on what it is like to ride the Hudson Line, to [Verity](http://archiveofourown.org/users/verity) for listening to my plot bunnies despite not following either fandom, and to Intern Dana for Joan & Kim. I am also indebted to the following books: For information about Philipse Manor, _The Women of the House: How a Colonial She-Merchant Built a Mansion, a Fortune, and a Dynasty_ by Jean Zimmerman; For general background, _Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America_ by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur; For deeper background and general flavor, _Everyday Life in Early America_ by David Freeman Hawke and _New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan_ by Jill Lepore.


End file.
